Biography ben quilty

Ben Quilty (born 1973) is an Australian artist and social commentator, who has won a series of painting prizes: the 2014 Prudential Eye Award, 2011 Archibald.
Ben Quilty (b.
Ben Quilty's career has been largely influenced by his experience of contemporary Australian culture, and particularly the drug-and-alcohol imbued culture.

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Ben Quilty

Australian artist and social commentator

Ben Quilty (born 1973) is an Australian artist and social commentator, who has won a series of painting prizes: the 2014 Prudential Eye Award, 2011 Archibald Prize, and 2009 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. He has been described as one of Australia's most famous living artists.

Early life and education

Quilty was born in Sydney in 1973,^[1]^[2]^[3] and grew up in Kenthurst in Sydney's north-west.^[4]

He was educated at Kenthurst Public School and Oakhill College,^{[citation needed]} where he exhibited his HSC artwork in ARTEXPRESS in 1991 (or 1992^[5]). Subsequently, Quilty was selected as the recipient of the Julian Ashton Summer School Scholarship.^[3]^[6]

After high school, Quilty followed his interest in art and obtained a Bachelor of Visual Arts in Painting from Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney, graduating in 1994. He earned a Certificate in Aboriginal Culture and History in 1996, and went on to study visual co

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b. 1973, Sydney, AU
Lives and works in Sydney, AU

Ben Quilty's figurative work explores colonization, violence, and masculinity in Western communities. The artist's paintings contain surreal male forms set against bare, apocalyptic backdrops. Each central figure stands, sits, or falls in a shallow foreground. Like actors on a stage, they command the compositions, offering an abundance of energy, motion, and color before their outdoor backdrops, which resemble the harrowing vastness of sandy, unpopulated beaches or the desert. Quilty's grotesque configurations are redolent of Francis Bacon’s cursed subjects, who contort violently, collapsing in on themselves and into the materiality of paint. Quilty joined the Australian Defense Force in 2011 as an official war artist tasked with interpreting the experiences of Australian service personnel. And in 2016, Quilty traveled to Greece, Serbia, and Lebanon with Australian writer Richard Flanagan to produce art that captured experiences of the refugee crisis. He found that the photographs he took whil

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AustLit

Quilty spent his formative years in Kenthurst, an outer suburb of north-western Sydney, where he participated in a youth culture of self-destructive masculinity. Drugs, alcohol and testosterone-fuelled recklessness shaped his late teenage years and became a major influence on his artistic practice. After finishing high school, he obtained a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts and a Bachelor of Visual Communication from the University of Western Sydney that also included a course on Women’s Studies. He later went on to undertake a course in Aboriginal Studies at the University of Melbourne.

Most noted for his work in portraiture, Quilty won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2009 for his capture of Jimmy Barnes and the Archibald Prize in 2011 for his portrait of personal mentor, Margaret Olley. Later in 2011, the Australian War Memorial commissioned him as an official war artist to capture of the experiences of Australian Defence force personnel participating in Operation Slipper in Afghanistan.

Ben Quilty was appointed a trustee to the Art Gal