Ben Quilty’s Unsettling Silhouettes at Tolarno Galleries

Ben Quilty‘s highly anticipated exhibition, Shadowed, is showing at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne until 1 July 2023.

The title of the exhibition refers to the use of silhouettes, whose history includes everything from Indonesian shadow theatre and Greek black-figure ceramics to French silhouette portraiture and the cinema of German Expressionism.

Quilty uses the formal properties of the silhouette to depict characters that include likenesses of: Auguste Rodin (Quilty has kept a book on the French sculptor in his studio for 20 years); a Taliban fighter (Quilty spent time in Afghanistan in 2011 as Australia’s official war artist); and John (a neighbour who gives Quilty lemons over the back fence), among others.

Six gessoed canvases, upon which charcoal, graphite and oils are used to depict a ‘shadowed’ figure’ confronted by grotesque apparitions of teeth, eyeballs and bulbous noses.

Quilty also includes three powerful and painterly large oils: The Daughter (2023); The Father (2023), and Australia Day (2023), which advance the notion of terror and dislocation that pervades the works, reminiscent of Goya’s paintings of internal horror.

There are also 17 gouaches, in which the profile line is used in portraiture to further explore internal tensions through movement and expression.

The exhibition is Quilty’s eighth solo show at the gallery.

The artist was also the subject of a major survey show at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2019 that subsequently toured to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Queensland Art Gallery. His work is represented in major public collections in Australia.

Main image: Exhibition view: Ben Quilty, Shadowed (3 June–1 July 2023). Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne. Courtesy Tolarno Galleries.