Design and Art Australia Online

Ben Quilty was a child of Sydney’s northern hinterland, spending his boyhood at Kenthurst, New South Wales.
His first success came when the major work he made for Visual Arts in the Higher School Certificate was exhibited at the Art Express exhibition. He was also awarded a summer school scholarship at the Julian Ashton Art School.
He subsequently completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts in 1994, before studying for a certificate in Aboriginal Culture and History from Monash University in 1996. In 2001, feeling dissatisfied with his earlier study, he completed a Bachelor of Visual Communication at the University of Western Sydney.
The following year he was awarded the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship for his work Elwood Park (2002), leading to a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. The awarding of the scholarship was a turning point in Quilty’s career as it enabled him to paint full time. At the announcement of the scholarship he met and befriended the veteran artist, Margaret Olley, who became a mentor and close friend.
While in Paris Quilty’s works began to draw from Australian Icons, and the cultural rites of passage that were undertaken by Australian males growing up in the 1980s. These works payed particular attention to the violent and damaging behaviour surrounding the rituals of young male culture, in particular depicting fast cars, fast food, and the influence of drugs and alcohol. Quilty later undertook residencies at The Gunnery, New South Wales Ministry for the Arts (2004), Hill End, Bathurst Regional Gallery (2005), and the Australian Council of the Arts Barcelona Studio, Spain (2007).
In 2005 he married Kylie Needham, a scriptwriter who he had met while working as film editor for Channel Seven news.
Quilty’s painting style can be recognized from his thick layering of paint. He uses different forms of palette knife, smearing the paint to create his figures. Quilty does not attempt to hide the strokes from his knife, rather he utilises the thick slabs of paint to block in large areas of the canvas, with high contrast colours.
Quilty has repeatedly used spray paint as a sketching technique, drawing his forms first with the aerosol can and then using oils over the top, allowing the two mediums to appear together on the end product of the canvas. Spray paint is also employed to extend out of the canvas and onto the gallery walls.
In 2007 the Quilty family, which by then included his first child, Joe, spent four months in the Australia Council’s studio in Barcelona. Here he was exposed to graffiti culture, as well as religious iconography. Religious rorschach images are most strongly apparent on the walls of churches in Spain. This became a particular interest of Quilty’s, and emerged as major components to many of his later works. Quilty has since used the rorschach technique in painting religious imagery, skulls, and portraits.

In the following years he began to focus on icons in Australian culture including images of Captain Cook and John Howard paired with portraits of anonymous participants of the Cronulla riots, his screaming son and intoxicated friends.
He also turned more to portraiture, trying to capture the essence underneath the surface of his subjects. He was awarded the 2009 Moran Prize. 2011 he was awarded the Archibald Prize for his portrait of Margaret Olley, who had previously been the subject of William Dobell’s Archibald winning portrait of 1948.
In October 2011 the Australian War Memorial commissioned Quilty to travel to Afghanistan, embedded with the Australian Army. Quilty was the same generation as the soldiers who fought in that long war, and he was profoundly affected by the trauma experienced by the troops. He later joined the board of the Australian War Memorial, and he also invited those who had experience the war to come to his home, where he painted their pain. His 2014 exhibition, After Afghanistan, helped many to understand the internal turmoil experienced by those sent to war.
His memories of his own reckless youth gave him empathy with those who fell foul of the law. He began to travel to Bali, to teach art to the prisoners of the “Bali Nine”, the young drug mules who had been arrested in Indonesia after information was provided by the Australian Federal Police. He led the public campaign for compassion after Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran were sentenced to death. He was profoundly affected by their execution in 2015 and the following year curated an exhibition of Sukumaran’s work.
In 2019 and 2020 Quilty was honoured with a national touring retrospective of his art, organised by the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Writers:

Letourneau, Luke

Date written:

2012

Last updated:

2022