Ben Quilty: The Emu Man

About

Quilty’s paintings are largely influenced by his experience of contemporary Australian culture, and particularly the drug-and-alcohol imbued culture of his youth; later experiences including political activism and a position as an official war artist have also shaped his practice. The bold themes which dominate Quilty’s practice are denoted through his painting aesthetic which is equally dimensional, confrontational and dynamic.

“Painting is very personal, it’s all about confronting your own humanity [....] there is so much to make work about and if welded in an idyllic Utopian world, maybe then I will make beautiful paintings” (Ben Quilty, 2021)

THE EMU MANshowcases recent figurative and expressionistic works in the artist’s characteristic impasto style, which were influenced by the environment of COVID lockdowns and the Australian landscape. In Arooma Rorschach, After Heysen Quilty pays homage to Hans Heysen, German-born Australian landscape painter. Heysen made works about the Australian trees on the edge of the deserts that join the Southern Indian Ocean to the continent. Quilty’s dad loves Heysen’s work. Shortly before Heysen made his iconic landscape paintings murderous white men road across the desert massacring the indigenous families who had called that landscape home for sixty thousand years. Heysen's works are mesmerisingly beautiful, but also deeply sad. The last painting made for this show, Emu Man, the washed-up old superhero, might be a self-portrait, unable to repair the past and incapable of changing the future but happily surviving Covid.