Known for his expressive impasto portraiture, Ben Quilty is a prominent Australian artist who has served as Australia's official war artist, and often works to draw attention to humanitarian and social crises.
Read MoreBorn in Sydney in 1973, Ben Quilty attended the Sydney College of the Arts at Sydney University, graduating with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in painting in 1994. Subsequently he attained a Certificate in Aboriginal Culture & History from Monash University in 1996, and a Bachelor of Visual Communications from the University of Western Sydney in 2001.
Quilty's made his art scene debut in 2002 with his 'Torana' paintings, painterly depictions of the artists beloved LJ Torana. Paintings of the car, with the cultural value and personal memories attached to it, served as a vehicular self-portrait for the artist. In the later Van Rorschach (2005), the artist presented a life size painting of his more practically mini-van—rendered in thick swathes of paint with the aid of a trowel designed for cake decoration.
Recognisable for their rich impasto surfaces and expressive forms, Ben Quilty's paintings subvert notions of traditional portraiture to explore the relationship between the personal and the cultural. Addressing confronting and unsettling subject matter they at once challenge the viewer and the supposed limits of the medium.
In 2011, Quilty was appointed Australia's official war artist. He observed the activities of the Australian Defence Force in Kabul, Kandahar, and Tarin Kowt and subsequently spent six months producing work for the Australian War Memorial's National Collection.
Describing his a-political approach to these paintings the artist told Ocula Magazine in 2014, 'In the end, my story was to tell the story of what was happening to the people involved and responding to the immediate experience of what was happening. It was a very visceral response to the human condition, and what happens to human beings under such circumstances.'
Ben Quilty's familiarity with the war-torn nation led him to run a fundraising campaign in 2021, to raise money to support Afghan people facing uncertainties after the Taliban takeover of the country.
In 2016 Quilty travelled to Lebanon, Greece, and Serbia as a guest of World Vision alongside author Richard Flanagan to document the plight of Syrian refugees. Works both by the artist and by the refugee children that he encountered were exhibited in a solo exhibition titled The Stainat Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne.
From an early stage of his career Ben Quilty made paintings that compositionally and conceptually incorporated elements of the Rorschach technique. Developed in the 1920s by Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach, as a psychological tool, the test revolves around the perception of mirrored inkblots. Quilty adapts these ideas to examine dual perspectives of land, culture and history.
This is most apparent even in works from 2021 like Prayer, and the 'Afterlife' paintings. Here the colourful works take the appearance of the Rorschach ink blots more directly. Even in more figurative images like The Great Barrier Reef (2021) and On Lizard Island (2021), there is a duality between the pairs of wrestling figures that almost seem to emanate as conflicting sides from the same body.
Ben Quilty has also expanded his artistic scope to sculpture, in 2018 he made the sculpture, Not a Creature Was Stirring using the life jackets used by Syrian refugees. In 2021 he also created the playful figurative bronze Freefall (2021), an inverted nude figure seemingly partially buried headfirst in the ground.
Ben Quilty has been the recipient of numerous awards including the 2014 Prudential Eye Award, the 2011 Archibald Prize, the 2009 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, and the National Artists Self Portrait Prize in 2007. Quilty received an Honorary Doctorate of Creative Arts from the Western Sydney University in 2015.
Ben Quilty has been the subject of gallery and institutional group exhibitions and solo exhibitions.
Ben Quilty solo exhibitions include: The Entangled Landscape, Cairns Art Gallery, Cairns, (2020); Quilty, Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art, (2019); Straight White Male, Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong (2015); Ben Quilty, Saatchi Gallery, London (2014); Drawing, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne (2014); After Afghanistan, National Art School, Sydney (2013); and The Fiji Wedding, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne (2013); Ben Quilty LIVE!, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Melbourne (2009).
Ben Quilty Group exhibitions include: We Change The World, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2021); Something Living, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2017); The longest war, Australian War Memorial, Canberra (2016); Animal/Human, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2012); Together in Harmony for 50 Years: Linking Australian and Korean Arts, Korean Cultural Exchange Centre, Seoul (2011); Thai-Australian Contemporary Prints, Chiang-Mai University Art Museum, Thailand (2006).
Ben Quilty's website can be found here and Ben Quilty's Instagram can be found here.
Ocula | 2022
