
Serwah Attafuah: a powerful and most welcome voice in contemporary Australian art
Virtuosic digital artistry is on show in Serwah Attafuah’s installation The Darkness Between the Stars, currently showing at ACMI.
Ben Quilty, The Last Supper no.4, 2017, oil on linen, 265 x 202 cm. Courtesy the artist and Jan Murphy Gallery.
Ben Quilty, The podcast (Liam) 2017, oil on linen, 265 x 202 cm. Courtesy the artist and Jan Murphy Gallery.
Ben Quilty, The blue pill (explain the world), 2016, oil on linen, 182 x 173 cm. Courtesy the artist and Jan Murphy Gallery.
In recent years Ben Quilty’s profile has been elevated with his human rights advocacy, notably for Myuran Sukumaran who was killed by firing squad for his role in drug trafficking in Indonesia. Quilty’s paintings have always explored social concerns in a gutsy way. His impastoed excursions on these themes (and more) contrast the pleasures of colourful and thickly layered paint with emotionally loaded issues. Their power has seen his work become highly sought after.
Last year, Quilty’s interest in the international refugee crisis saw him travel to Greece, Serbia and Lebanon with World Vision Australia where he witnessed the trauma, dysfunction and disease caused by global unrest. As a result, this exhibition, titled The Last Supper, features a double edge of pessimism and rebirth. Quilty ponders, in painterly terms alone, the confronting state of the world and humanity today.
The paintings generated along these lines are abstracted mutations of the human head, akin in their angst-ridden psychic pain to work by Australian surrealist James Gleeson. There is a violence implied here – an unspeakable angst – with the work a psychic outpouring concerning a seemingly insoluble problem. Quilty told Art Guide Australia, “I’ve been trying to distill the psychosis of the world into paintings, without leaving my studio… I’ve been working with live models, from all parts of the human condition, very young and very old, male, female, disabled and myself. There is a violence in the process… The works aren’t obvious, but there are passages of figuration that I hope suggest parables about the self-indulgent madness of contemporary societies.”
Their depiction of a world in extremis makes the point with palpable force.
The Last Supper
Ben Quilty
Jan Murphy Gallery
27 May – 17 June