Ben Quilty

This resource and some works of art in the exhibition deal with issues relating to asylum seekers, mental health and suicide.

One of the country’s leading contemporary artists, Ben Quilty was born in 1973 and grew up in north-west Sydney. He completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (painting) at Sydney College for the Arts, Aboriginal Culture and History at Monash University and Visual Communication at the University of Western Sydney. Quilty is known for his inventiveness with paint through his thick oil paint portraits and his investigations into Australian identity.

In 2002 he was awarded the Brett Whiteley Travelling Scholarship which took him to Paris on a 3-month residency at Cité Internationale des Arts. Quilty began to paint full time and reflected on the suburban male psyche and rites of passage.

In 2011 Quilty was awarded the Archibald Prize for his portrait of painter Margaret Olley. During the same year he was commissioned as an official war artist with the Australian War Memorial, where he travelled to Afghanistan, spending three weeks in Kabul, Kandahar and Tarin Kowt. Upon his return, he created After Afghanistan a series of twenty-one portraits and abstract landscapes, which challenged the traditional representations of Australian soldiers. He painted them bearing the wounds of war, reminding us with swathes of bruised paint of its pointlessness.

Today Quilty is a visible and vocal critical citizen. He is committed to art’s capacity to make change, and to that end he was invited in 2016 by World Vision to go to Lebanon, Syria and Greece to experience first-hand the exodus of Syrian refugees. Painting with muscularity and meaning is one way that he makes sense of the here and now. In his words, ‘my work is about working out how to live in this world, it’s about compassion and empathy but also anger and resistance’.

The inspiration for Ben Quilty’s monumental Rorschach painting is an Australian scene painted in Europe 140 years ago by H.J. Johnstone, Evening shadows, backwater of the Murray, South Australia. Read simply, the original painting depicts a tranquil scene at the end of the day: a Ngarrindjeri family camping at a scenic river bend along the River Murray prepare for the evening. Another possible reading sees the painting as a nineteenth- century allegorical meditation on the perceived decline and disappearance of Aboriginal people.

Quilty’s eight-panel painting Evening shadows, Rorschach after Johnstone remakes the original painting to comment on Australia’s history. Inspired by Hermann Rorschach’s eponymous ink blots – an early twentieth-century psychological- testing tool – Quilty loads the canvas with impasto oil paint, only to destroy the surface by pressing a second unpainted canvas directly onto the first. Chance intervenes by creating accidents and abstractions that invite us to reflect on our own perceptions, desires and experiences.

In high school, Quilty received a book on Australian landscape painting as an art prize. The book included a reproduction of Evening Shadows, Backwater of the Murray, South Australia, painted in London in 1880 by H.J. Johnstone. Quilty recalls being seduced by the painting’s romanticism yet troubled by the accompanying interpretation of the painting offered in the book. A late-nineteenth-century mash-up, Evening shadows depicts Aboriginal figures in a picturesque river landscape at twilight. By staging the scene at the end of the day, the painting reiterates an all-too-convenient and, at the time, popular allegory – the demise of Indigenous people and their traditional way of life. Evening Shadows, donated in 1881, was the first work of art acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Quilty created Evening shadows, Rorschach after Johnstone (2012) using a method inspired by Hermann Rorschach’s eponymous ink blots, introduced in the early twentieth century as a tool for psychological testing. This technique is also one that was prized by Rorschach’s contemporaries, the Surrealists – a version of their much-loved decalcomania, a technique of chance that invited free association and creative delirium. This way of working represents a perilous strategy as a painting technique – Quilty loads the canvas with impasto oil paint, only to destroy the paint surface by pressing a second unpainted canvas directly onto the first. The process – in essence a reprographic one – demands the meticulous control of paint, colour and composition, but it also invites possibility. Chance intervenes in creating accidents and abstractions that invite the viewer to reflect on their own perceptions, desires and experiences.

Written by Dr. Lisa Slade, Assistant Director, Artistic Programs.

Large Rorschach paintings recur throughout the exhibition. Using a psychoanalytical tool designed to evaluate and extract the dark and unconscious elements of personality and experience, Quilty’s monumental ink blot paintings explores the dark undercurrent of the Australian psyche, one haunted by violence and displacement.

Devised by Herman Rorschach in the early twentieth century as a method of psychological assessment, ‘Rorschacing’ is also referred to as an ink blot test, where an abstract shape is shown to a patient providing insight into their psychology and anxieties. This technique is also one that was prized by Rorschach’s contemporaries, the Surrealists – a version of their much-loved decalcomania, a technique of chance that invited free association and creative delirium. This way of working represents a perilous strategy as a painting technique – Quilty loads the canvas with impasto oil paint, only to destroy the paint surface by pressing a second unpainted canvas directly onto the first. The process – in essence a reprographic one – demands the meticulous control of paint, colour and composition, but it also invites possibility. Chance intervenes in creating accidents and abstractions that invite the viewer to reflect on their own perceptions, desires and experiences’

- Dr. Lisa Slade, Quilty exhibition room guide, 2019.

After Afghanistan is a series of 21 highly charged portraits and landscapes. These works depict the state of mind of the soldier and the emotional damage caused by war. After his consignment Quilty invited soldiers to his studio in Australia to have their portrait painted while they spoke of their experiences. From these stories Quilty learnt that many soldiers were suffering from PTSD as a result of serving in Afghanistan, a reality of war that has remained largely untouched by commissioned war artists.