The River
Jan Murphy Gallery
13 May – 6 June 2026
There is a particular kind of quiet that can be found in descent, in heading down to some place. Not up to a lookout or out toward a horizon, but down into the base of a valley, where the walls rise steeply on all sides and the world is made to recede. In this body of work, Quilty turns downward to such a place: a river set deep within the landscape, where the scale and weight of the terrain is both oppressive and assuring. Here, one has the sensation of being underneath everything, as though the weight of history, geological and otherwise, hangs just above and all around.
To arrive requires effort. The descent is deliberate, and the return requires a different kind of resolve. It is difficult not to think of mythic precedents, journeys into the underworld, spaces of retreat, reflection, or reckoning. Yet this is not a place of darkness, but one punctuated by moments of extraordinary light. Late in the afternoon and early in the morning, sunlight cuts across a vast rock shelf, illuminating the valley with a kind of theatrical precision. The space reveals itself as a stage, expansive, immersive, and strangely composed. It is this sense of both accident and intention that seems to hold Quilty’s attention, as though the landscape itself is performing.
These works emerge from a desire to withdraw from the noise of the world, but they are not acts of denial. The river does not offer escape so much as opportunities for processing. In the absence of phone reception and other forms of contact, in the isolation of the valley is room to sit with difficult topics. In the case of this series: a quiet grief for the natural world. If Quilty’s earlier paintings grappled with the immediacy of political and social violence, here that violence is slower, more diffuse, but no less pervasive. The environmental degradation that underpins these paintings is not always directly visible, and perhaps that is precisely the point. What is out of sight is easily displaced, deferred, or forgotten.
Within this landscape, figures appear, almost intrusively. Quilty’s ongoing enquiry into masculinity finds a new articulation here, as men enter the scene not as passive observers, but as agents of disruption. Holding axes, they hack into the very environment that surrounds them. The gesture is both literal and symbolic, echoing broader cycles of extraction, consumption, and waste. Rendered as a commodity, timber becomes product, product becomes trend, trend becomes discard. The rhythm is familiar, even banal.
There is a clear sense of disquiet beneath the surface of these works. Yet their beauty is not diminished by this, but thickened and tangled by it. In the landscape, the threat is often imagined as something elemental or unknown, yet more often than not, it is human. These figures complicate the romanticism of place, unsettling any notion of it as purely restorative. Instead, the environment becomes a site of tension, where beauty and destruction coexist. At intervals, an eye surfaces within the composition. It does not belong entirely to the landscape, nor to the figures that inhabit it, but operates as a point of consciousness within the work itself. This is not a simple inversion of the gaze, nor a gesture that returns the viewer to themselves in any resolved way. Rather, it unsettles the conditions of looking altogether. The painting begins to register the viewer as part of the same field it describes, collapsing distance and complicating the idea of spectatorship. One is no longer outside of the scene, but implicated within it, subject to the same forces of extraction, consumption, and quiet neglect.
In this sense, these works feel like a threshold. While they are grounded in a specific place, they extend toward a broader enquiry that is still unfolding within Quilty’s practice. The concerns that gather here, environmental fragility, masculine agency, cycles of use and abandonment, form part of a body of work in development, leading toward a major institutional solo exhibition scheduled for 2027. Throughout this exploration, Quilty returns to the river. It is not simply a site of refuge, but one of witness. It is a place that holds memory, of what has been, and what is at risk of being lost. In this sense, the landscape paintings function less as declarations and more as acts of remembrance. Not unlike a wake, they gather fragments of the world as it is, allowing space to reflect on what it has been, and what it might yet become.
Tolarno Galleries
Feb – March 2025
I have a shell I picked up on the beach a few years ago. I can’t recall which beach or which year, but I know it was the south coast, and I know it was in the last five years.
I keep the shell in a place I reach for every day, so I get to see the shell, touch the shell and remember that I love this shell. Sometimes I take it from its everyday place, into my hand and roll it around my palm. My one big question to this shell is ‘how old are you?’. I speak to this banal phenomenon of my every day because it was one of the first things that popped into my mind when Ben shared the title of this show with me, ‘Trinkets’. We had been in the studio, rolling the potential works for this show between us, and decisions had been made.
Trinkets are a strange thing. When I search for the etymology of the word I find it was first recorded in a play in the late fifteenth century, ‘I haue..sene her trynketts For payntyng thyngs inumerable Squalmys & balmys’[1]. Very nice! Little objects, with associated words attached such as toy, ornament, showy, small have long been rendered in perpetuity. Trinkets have a bit of an identity crisis then, little things of little value that we cherish and hold onto forever and ever? Alas, I reach a dead end on the meaning of Squalmys and balmys, but a theory will emerge soon. I come to the conclusion that trinkets, with their humble place in the world, can transcend systems of time and value.
Time and value are two forces that run our lives, most of us are at the mercy of both running out concurrently. We can pitch one against the other on any given day in the hope of prolonging pleasure or hurrying along the awful. I have hope this is what the squalmys and balmys might be alluding to — the pace in which we individually move through the world and what we can hold on to when things move too fast — people gone too quickly, when it hurts, and life becomes measured in the unendurable length of one second and then another.
This collection of works, Ben’s trinkets, has all of this within it. We know Ben Quilty, we know he paints hard and fast. The paint is thick, smells great (to me), and yields to the artist completely. Some think Quilty’s work takes on the literal weight of the world: heavy, twisted, thick paintings that don’t budge.
But time moves forward and there are new things for us to look at in ‘Trinkets’. Works set to a more personal rhythm, the relative values one human being; working, loving, making, painting, drawing and people all pitted against his own time, running out. Ben talks about mortality, often. Some of the people in this show are no longer alive, but he still loves them. When we talk about each work and the people within them, I realise that Ben doesn't really use past tense in his speech. When I see him on any given day, I see a person whose emotions ferment over time, intensely, in a way that charges each day with that same intensity. His inner terrain is enormous, and it can get dark. But therein lies the glorious compulsion to make.
‘Trinkets’ shows us Quilty’s range, with honesty. The big, hard and fast oil paintings have been put aside for the most part. This show has the fury and the pain we expect of Ben, but there is vulnerability and, more ellipses than ever. I ask questions as my eyes run over ink, gouache, charcoal - who is dying, what are you so worried about, what the fuck happened that night? Some of these inks are darker than the oil paint dares to be. Devoid of colour, new and old faces are beaten into shape by the artist’s charcoal, by his memories and potentially, by his fear. Fear that time is running out, before we can secure a new and lasting way of valuing life, and the very thing that we have fought so hard for, the choice to value humanity over the other more frightening potentials when it is lost.
Ever present in this show is the eye — lid drooped, barely open or way too open, staring in all directions. This could be a way to see into the emotional landscape of the artist, to meet him, eye to eye. Rather than looking away when it's too sad, too hard, too confronting. It isn’t sad to me that there is a tortuous feeling imbued into most of these works. It makes me proud the artist has found a way to share his inner world, outside of his comfort zone and away from the protection of the paint we have made him so responsible for. I follow the stare of one rancid eye to another and see the things that time can do to our perception; it can bulge, distort, yellow and fade whatever good we thought was left. But what it can also do is transcend the little bit of love, of hope, of colour. That little bit might be just the size of my shell, small enough to roll around in my palm, but it could swell into something crucial and spectacular that cannot be stopped. Hope is not lost here, nor for Quilty, because he is still compelled to make work, to capture the living before they are dead, to remember them as they are. Making work is hope, making work is resistance to the worst that could happen. Making work is a way to stay fixed in the present.
‘Trinkets’, as a collection of works by Ben Quilty, challenges the relative value a system might place on them. Trinkets, if we let them, are not simply ‘things’ but rather pathways in colour to a kinder place, one that is special. In darkness, that pathway can be what we need most.
[1] Fernando De Rojas, ‘Celestina, Or, the Tragicke-Comedy of Calisto and Melibea’, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 1499, 2009.
Jan Murphy Gallery - November 2024
This unique collection of artworks spans two decades of Ben Quilty’s practice and commemorates his 20th year with Jan Murphy Gallery. This period is witness to defining moments in the artist’s career, presenting works that carry profound personal significance. This exhibition can play a key role in weaving a narrative around extensive bodies of work and drawing attention to pivotal moments of insight and personal agency. For audiences, they can offer a vivid and imaginative voyage, akin to immersing oneself in a book. These works have the capacity to lead the audience through the internal landscape of an artist’s mind, and are undeniably vital for charting, or at least endeavouring
to chart, the expansive language of an artist’s career. Certainly, as an artist, presenting two decades of work can evoke a sense of introspective unease. However, it should also be cherished as an opportunity to step back and see a whole picture of oneself. This particular articulation of Quilty’s career is punctuated by his portrait of Margaret Olley, not only a defining work in the artist’s trajectory, but a painting which has become a key part of how Olley herself is honoured, a revered figure within the Australian art community.
The earliest work in this exhibition is New York (2000), a vivid urban landscape captured during the artist’s first trip abroad. Often compared to Auerbach for his dedication to thick, textured, figurative painting, this work shares a profound resemblance to Auerbach’s Morning Crescent works. Filled with chaotic arrangements of street diagonals, towering buildings, and a frenzy of traffic, all amidst a vibrant glow of yellow, blue, orange, and red, New York, like Auerbach’s London landscapes, skilfully conveys a powerful sense of depth and perspective. Although Quilty, albeit self-deprecatingly, remembers a man in his mid-20s still living at home, meeting Kylie and being embarrassed to admit he’d never been overseas, perhaps in this radiant cityscape is a glimpse of the painter we would become so familiar with today.
Quilty’s application, removal, re-application of thick buttery oil paint is an impulsive drive, with an aim to convey an unarguable presence of the subject, some fundamental basis of actuality. Although his subjects are often a vehicle for social and political interrogations, throughout his practice there is also a tender and intimate nod to his ‘constant subjects’. A decade apart, Kylie asleep while I draw her (2010) and Kylie, a love letter (2020), the subject patiently lies while the artist consumes. There is distinctly a finer stroke in the latter work. Around 2020, Quilty created a series of poignant works in response to the bushfires that had a devastating impact on his local community and other areas across the country, which was closely followed by the global pandemic. This work on bodies held and displayed in cold spaces bled into a series on boxing and UFC. Operating tables, dining tables, fighting arenas, places for alienated subjects, and new ways to present tortured anatomies, steeped in friction, violence and ritual.
Another familiar face is Quilty’s son Joe. Ben created both of these as a new dad, likely feeling deranged with exhaustion and overcome with love. Joe, is captured in those years where communication is either a giggle or a scream, he has had his face smashed into the shape of a greasy works burger. One aspect of Quilty’s work that often goes unmentioned is how funny it can be. In Baby Joe (2007), he gazes at the viewer like a turtle hatchling, displaying characteristics of both an alien and a grumpy old man. Is he about to giggle or scream? This exhibition is deeply personal. These works serve as a reminder and an ongoing tribute to these constant subjects. An artist’s influences are often ordinary occurrences but, when applied correctly, have the gravity to ignite a more profound and existential conversation. While the work, Red XB (2006), echoes the iconic Torana series, which provided a window into chrome masculinity and petrolhead culture, was in fact painted after a Ford which was always parked outside a café that the young family frequented. Each painting might speak to a well-known series or theme, but they are all also woven intimately from the artist’s life.
For philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, being human was a creative enterprise, a work of art. She argued that it was not enough to shape oneself within the existing conditions of the world, but that one must also shape the conditions of the world itself. Today we recognise Quilty for his dutiful social and political commentary. This compulsion could perhaps be charted back to Bomber (2002). After completing a degree in feminist theory and digital studies, Quilty worked as a TV news editor. One of his responsibilities involved screening unfiltered foreign news feeds, many of which contained graphic footage of natural disasters and violent, politically charged scenes. He vividly recalls monitoring around 40 screens simultaneously, each streaming live footage from various parts of the world. His job was to filter out anything that might excessively disturb the home audience, guided by specific criteria mandated by corporate sponsorship agreements. Bomber was a significant painting, and one of five, that earned him the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, marking a pivotal moment in his career as an artist. In a sense, Bomber, and where it came from, foreshadows several of his later inquiries, represented here in Heba’s tiny jacket (2017), Homeland (2014), Conscript, (Private Phil Butler) (2014), Myuran (2012), and Trooper M, after Afghanistan (2012).
We can approach this collection of works as a comprehensive self-portrait. In his words, “the more closely I look at my own life, the easier it is to make work.” Quilty’s work promotes deep introspection, it is real, it is human. This approach may account for his ability to seamlessly integrate his own likeness with that of Cook and a skull. His acute awareness of his societal position transcends binary notions of right and wrong. He simply exists, flaws and all. While his work is inherently intertwined with its political context, Quilty does not aim to adopt an authoritative stance. Instead, he seems to produce deeply personal work in an endeavour to reconcile with it all.
"Ben Quilty paints like there is no tomorrow. In less than a decade he has become one of the country's favourite artists. Quilty uses licks of luscious paint to conjure his subjects which include his beloved LJ Torana, his "wasted" mates, his son Joe and more recently himself. His subjects are modern day memento mori; pithy reminders of our mortality and a call to live life in the fast lane. Painting itself is also the subject of Ben Quilty's work. He summons his subjects with a palpable physicality. Abstract slabs of vivid colour, often underpinned by urgent aerosol drawings, bring his subjects to life. This publication has been produced on the occassion of the first comprehensive survey exhibition of Ben Quilty's painting : BEN QUILTY LIVE!"