The Fiji Wedding is Ben Quilty's first exhibition at Tolarno Galleries. It is also his first major body of work following the completion of After Afghanistan, the paintings he made after his deployment to Afghanistan as an official war artist.
After returning from Afghanistan I went to an old mate's wedding in Fiji. It was a dark and disturbing experience although no one else seemed to notice! Big gates keep the locals out of the 'resort' and singlets and thongs have taken over the inside.
There are ten paintings in the exhibition and although there are some humorous aspects at play, overall it's a dark and intense group of works dealing with masculinity and identity, the continuing themes in Quilty's work.
Ben Quilty told Andrew Denton (who has written about The Fiji Wedding) that Survivor 2012 is the cross over work between this exhibition and the Afghan show. Inspired by the story of a young Afghan veteran, it is, he says, more about his own 'survival of the Fiji wedding!' He painted The Groom 2012, not in Fiji, but in NSW, the day after his friend Adam Cullen died.
Seroquel 2013 is an unnerving image of a man hovering upside down above an island. Seroquel is also the name of a drug used for schizophrenia, and more recently for Afghan vets with PTSD to help them sleep.
Myuran 2012 is titled after Myuran Sukaman, the young Australian on death row in Bali. Invited by supporters of Myuran, Quilty travelled to Kerobokan prison to give painting lessons to the prisoner who is completing a Fine Arts degree by correspondence.
The major work in the show: Fairy Bower Rorschach 2012 is an eight panel painting continuing Ben Quilty’s practice of oil painted Rorschach work where an original image is destroyed by pressing one panel at a time onto another similar sized panel. His work appropriates the Swiss psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach’s ink blot tests – widely seen as pioneering contemporary mental illness therapy and medication at the beginning of the 20th century. The image is of a waterfall at Bundanoon in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales near where Quilty lives and works.
Fairy Bower Falls is an idyllic and spectacular destination for tourists and locals. Fairy Bower Falls is also reputedly the site of a massacre of scores of aboriginal people in the early 19th century. Although there are no written records there has been a strong oral history of such an event handed down amongst locals.
By rorschaching this image of such a precarious site Quilty aims to reinterpret the landscape and force the viewer to re-adjust their preconception of the Australian landscape as a peaceful space of beauty. This work continues his exploration of Australian identity.
As Lisa Slade, Art Gallery of SA, has pointed out, there is a 'pattern of creation, destruction and re-creation' in Ben Quilty’s rorchach paintings that parallels the recurring themes in his work. Ben Quilty won the 2011 Archibald prize with his portrait of Margaret Olley and the 2009 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize with a double (Rorschach) portrait of Jimmy Barnes. In 2011 the Australian War Memorial sent Quilty to Afghanistan as an official war artist. More than 11,000 visitors went to see the exhibition: Ben Quilty: After Afghanistan at the National Art School Gallery Sydney, in February – April 2013.
Press release courtesy Tolarno Galleries.
104 Exhibition Street, Level 4
Melbourne, 3000
Australia
www.tolarnogalleries.com
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The gallery is temporarily closed until further notice.
Tuesday–Friday: 10am–5pm
Saturday: 1pm–5pm