Open: Tue-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat 1pm-4pm
Level 5, 104 Exhibition St., VIC 3000, Melbourne, Australia
Open: Tue-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat 1pm-4pm
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Ben Quilty: Shadowed
Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne
Sat 3 Jun 2023 to Sat 1 Jul 2023
Level 5, 104 Exhibition St., VIC 3000 Ben Quilty: Shadowed
Tue-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat 1pm-4pm
Artist: Ben Quilty
Opening: Saturday 3 June, 1pm-3pm. RSVP
Shadowed marks Ben Quilty’s eighth solo show with Tolarno Galleries.
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Inspired by the traditions of silhouette portraiture, which became popular in 18th-century Europe, Quilty has created a rogue’s gallery of psycho-surreal and post-cubist heads that are by turns monstrous, mesmerising and magnificent.
A portraits show like no other, Shadowed includes likenesses of Rodin and a Taliban fighter (Quilty spent time in Afghanistan in 2011) as well as portraits of himself and his daughter.
These are interspersed with grotesque composites birthed in the artist’s shapeshifting imagination that present as tragicomic embodiments of the conflicts and paradoxes plaguing the present moment.
Ben Quilty
A leading artist of his generation, Ben Quilty was born in Sydney and held his first solo exhibition in 2001.
Quilty won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2009 and the Archibald Prize in 2011. In 2011 he spent a period of time in Afghanistan as official war artist with the Australian War Memorial.
In 2019 he was the subject of a major survey show at the Art Gallery of South Australia, which subsequently toured to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art.
Quilty’s work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, and Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, among others.
