Ben Quilty / Australia

Australia born 1973

Ben Quilty’s paintings invite viewers to consider current social and political issues. The impasto-style painting High tide mark, 2016, was the result of the artist travelling that year to Greece, Serbia and Lebanon to witness firsthand the global refugee crisis. On a beach in Lesbos, Quilty observed a ‘high tide mark’ of bright orange life jackets, discarded by Syrian asylum seekers as they reached the shore after making the perilous journey across open ocean from Turkey. In Quilty’s words, the vest symbolises the ‘ocean of humans that have moved across those waters’, themselves dislocated and dispersed like the cast-off jackets.

BIO

Quilty is represented in public and private collections in Australia and internationally and is the recipient of numerous awards for his work. He won the Archibald Prize in 2011 for his portrait of Margaret Olley, and the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2009. The Australian War Memorial commissioned Quilty as an official war artist to Afghanistan in 2011.