20 Years

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.