AustLit
-
This image has been sourced from The University of Western SydneyBEN QUILTY
Born in Sydney, Australia 1973
This artist's profile was developed by Emily Baker during 2014 at The University of Queensland as a part of the Visual Arts Curating and Writing course, convened by Dr Allison Holland.
-
Quilty spent his formative years in Kenthurst, an outer suburb of north-western Sydney, where he participated in a youth culture of self-destructive masculinity. Drugs, alcohol and testosterone-fuelled recklessness shaped his late teenage years and became a major influence on his artistic practice. After finishing high school, he obtained a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts and a Bachelor of Visual Communication from the University of Western Sydney that also included a course on Women’s Studies. He later went on to undertake a course in Aboriginal Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Most noted for his work in portraiture, Quilty won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2009 for his capture of Jimmy Barnes and the Archibald Prize in 2011 for his portrait of personal mentor, Margaret Olley. Later in 2011, the Australian War Memorial commissioned him as an official war artist to capture of the experiences of Australian Defence force personnel participating in Operation Slipper in Afghanistan.
Ben Quilty was appointed a trustee to the Art Gallery of New South Wales Trust in 2012 further cementing himself as a leading Australian artist. Represented throughout national and state galleries, his work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally with solo shows across Australia, Korea, The Philippines and upcoming openings in Paris, London and Hong Kong.
-
Ben Quilty’s prolific career began when he first went to art school in the 1990s and went on to include numerous solo and group exhibitions. A leading Australian artist, his distinctive style of painting set him apart from contemporaries with its thick, textural form. Simultaneously breaking into the third dimension and the boundaries of a modernist understanding of painting, Quilty’s work is the subject of much academic examination. He has thoroughly examined the condition of modern masculinity with all its initiation rites, subconscious desires and outward action and there have been major exhibitions held around the world from the UQ Museum of Art to BOM Gallery in Hong Kong to document this. In Australia, his award-winning portraits of Jimmy Barnes and Margaret Olley, as well as the countless other likenesses he has produced are possibly his greatest achievements. His aggressive style and unique method of applying wide slabs of paint make his portraits something truly beautiful – even if he would argue that some subjects deserve to be called ugly.
Ben Quilty shows no signs of slowing down; with big exhibitions opening in Paris, London and Hong Kong clearly demonstrating his definitive presence on the world art stage.
-
'I think men do those things because it’s like self-initiation. There’s no initiation process for young men. When you turn 18 you skull a yard glass and you spew on yourself and then you’re supposedly a male that’s got something to give to society. It’s just so far from how it should work. It’s definitely informed my work; it’s what I’m interested in because it’s where I’ve been. It’s what I’ve done. It's me as a willing participant in the mayhem that is the modern man.'
-
Ben Quilty
Jan Murphy Gallery
Brisbane, Australia
Tolarno Galleries
Melbourne, Australia
You might be interested in...
