The heart of the matter – celebrating Ben Quilty
Ben Quilty has always worn his heart on his sleeve – and you can see this in the highly personal artworks selected for a show that surveys 20 years of the artist exhibiting in Brisbane.
The Archibald Prize is always contentious – except for that year Ben Quilty won with his portrait of the late great Margaret Olley. It was 2011 and when the finalists were announced everyone said Quilty’s portrait had “winner” written all over it.
Quilty, one of Australia’s most compelling artists, was friends with Olley, who died later that same year at the age of 88.
That portrait has been in the artist’s collection since then,but he’s now ready to part with it. It’s one of the works in the exhibition Ben Quilty: 20 Years, now showing at Jan Murphy Gallery in Brisbane.
The opportunity to see this painting again in the flesh, so to speak, will get people through the door. Celebrating his two decades showing in Brisbane, this exhibition is a personal show and a kind of letting go of things.
“They are mostly very personal works that a few years ago I wouldn’t have considered selling,” Quilty tells me as he prepares to head north for his show. “When I was younger and a bit anxious I tended to save a huge amount of work. Artists don’t have superannuation. A lot of them I kept as a kind of security blanket. I’m still keeping a lot of work and there are works I will never sell.”
But now it’s time to share, with collectors, a range of stunning pieces, including Margaret Olley, that warm, craggy portrait of one of Australia’s most beloved artists.
Olley herself was happy to sit for Quilty, although she apparently had misgivings about her suitability as a subject.
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“She was so self-deprecating,” Quilty recalls. “She said, who wants to see my old face? I said, I assure you Margaret, everyone does. When she saw the portrait, she got quite emotional. She said, there’s the old bag.”
Olley is claimed by Brisbane because she was educated in the Queensland capital, yet she spent much of her life in Sydney and is claimed there too. And also, in Lismore, where she was born. The Margaret Olley Centre within the Tweed Regional Gallery, located at Murwillumbah in northern NSW, is a permanent exhibit featuring the interior of her Sydney home. It has become a pilgrimage site for art lovers.
“Everybody seems to have claimed her,” Quilty says. “Which is understandable.”
Quilty, 51, exhibited alongside Olley at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art in 2019. The two exhibitions took up the gallery’s ground floor and crowds flocked. “I got record numbers because of Margaret that year,” Quilty says. “She was looking after me.”
Olley is a legend in Brisbane and so, for that matter, is Quilty, who has been a fixture on the local art scene for two decades, thanks to his regular exhibitions at Jan Murphy Gallery. There was a time when he was such a regular visitor here that people assumed he was from Brisbane (he was okay with that), although he’s actually a Sydneysider who now resides in the NSW Southern Highlands with his wife, screenwriter and author Kylie Needham. The couple has two children, Joe and Olivia.
“I’ve shown more in Brisbane than anywhere else,” Quilty says. “And that’s because of my enduring relationship with Jan. I’ve shown nearly every year. It’s such a nice community there.”
The 20th anniversary celebrations this week will include a special event at The Calile Hotel as part of the Calile Culture series. It will feature Quilty in conversation with Nick Mitzevich, director of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. That’s a lovely way to mark a milestone for Quilty and Murphy, who says “working with Ben over the last 20 years has been a joy”.
“To be closely involved in someone’s practice for an extensive period is a privilege – both on a professional and personal level,” Murphy says. “I like to think Ben has made me a better gallerist but, more importantly, a better human.”
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Quilty says it is wonderful to have a dealer who is also a friend in an art world that is “fraught and difficult at times”. But he adds that he is “no curator” and he liaised with Murphy to select the works.
“This group of work covers all of my career, pretty much,” Quilty says. “From the first exploratory drawings made in New York in the shadows of Frank Auerbach to the most recent paintings made in Covid lockdown. Jan Murphy and I have been working together for 20 years. The exhibition is as much a celebration of a long collaboration and friendship as it is a chronological look inside my head.”
In her catalogue essay accompanying the show, Milena Stojanovska describes his unique style: “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.”
The early works in the exhibition include one of his beloved budgies (I termed them “smudgy budgies” when I first saw them). Blue spangled cock, 2003, is a classic, and while we all remember his early Torana paintings there is at least a car here too with the 2006 work Red XB.
While Quilty has painted beautiful things he is also known for painting confronting things, humans in extremis, including his After Afghanistan series. From October 11 until November 3 in 2011 Quilty was Australia’s Official War Artist, attached to the Australian Defence Force observing their activities in Kabul, Kandahar and Tarin Kowt.
What followed was a painterly investigation of the cost of war, the toll it takes on veterans, in particular. In this exhibition Trooper M, after Afghanistan is emblematic of that.
Myuran, 2012, is a tribute to his friend Myuran Sukumaran, a member of the infamous “Bali Nine”. In the years before Sukumaran’s execution for drug smuggling, he and Quilty became friends through a shared love of art. Quilty visited him in jail in Bali.
Quilty and author Richard Flanagan made a harrowing trip to Europe and the Middle East in 2016 to witness first-hand the refugee crisis. The poignant and tragic painting Heba’s tiny jacket (a refugee child’s life jacket) is a reminder of that journey.
On the one hand, Quilty is a serious bloke, however “one aspect of Quilty’s work that often goes unmentioned is how funny it can be”, writes Stojanovska. “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?”
Quilty’s oeuvre is rich and varied, although his latest strand of work is unexpected. “What are you painting right now?” I ask.
“Gnomes,” Quilty replies, and I wonder if I have heard right, although looking on the Jan Murphy Gallery website you will see some of his gnomes.
“I grew up believing in gnomes,” he says. These works are whimsical and mysterious in their way. Quilty’s gnomes are sagely, seeming to possess an ancient wisdom. And they come in peace, which may be the point.
I’m left intrigued. Ben Quilty can do that to you.
Ben Quilty: 20 Years continues at Jan Murphy Gallery, Fortitude Valley, until December 7; janmurphygallery.com.au