New York | On the eve of an art gallery opening in the Chelsea district, as workmen adjust the lighting, tweak frames and collect their tools, acclaimed Australian artist Ben Quilty is having some last-minute regrets about the name of his first New York show. Devil/God “doesn’t make sense” and is a working title, he declares in an interview with AFR Weekend, with scant regard for the marketing material sent weeks ago.
Instead, he is wondering if he will rename it The Night Before Christmas for an artwork of a grotesque Santa Claus who stole the true meaning of the holiday, and a trio of cherubic faces, flush with a mixture of shock, fear and disappointment.
“The show is focused around those three little kids looking at the future that we, the audience to this show, are offering them, and I take that very seriously,” says the father of two. “I’ve been painting my children ever since they were that age, and they’re now young adults going into the world to try and solve the problems that we’ve been making for them for many generations.”
Quilty has long used his art to mix autobiography with activism to examine brutal moments in history, such as massacres of Indigenous Australians, and stress uncomfortable realities, from a warming planet to the plight of asylum seekers or a pervasive hypermasculinity pumped out by algorithms.
In New York, at the Albertz Benda gallery, he is following that mode again, with a body of work that stems from his fury that the difference between right and wrong “feels blurred at the moment”. The paintings contain his recognisably visceral language of egg-beaten faces, guts on display and an iconically muscular car with a brain oozing over its roof; but after
completing them late last year and shipping them by sea, it has been months since the 53-year-old has seen the work.
“It’s darker than I remember,” he says. “There’s a darkness to it, which I think reflects many of my feelings and opinions about the way we’re all headed.”
The show also confronts, for the first time, the harsh Catholic schooling he received as a teenager in north-west Sydney and references decades of sexual abuse covered up by the church.
Quilty says it was the lashings in year seven in the private office of a Christian brother at Oakhill College that made him “pretty psychotic for a long time” and led to a youth of drinking, drugs and distrust of authority. Still, he says, “my suffering was tiny compared with so many young men that went through that system”.
During art school, he lived for a time with his uncle, who had been sexually abused as a young man in the priesthood. “He told me about how the brothers of the order that he was a part of would spend huge amounts of time making torture implements, making whips and straps, and he told me how they did it, and it stayed in my head.”
In a memorial to “my beautiful uncle” and in a bid to “reclaim that technology”, he has made a statue of Mary made from alternating layers of leather and plywood.
It is “fairly risky” territory, Quilty admits, for a show in the highly religious US, where potential new buyers may be encountering him for the first time. In Australia, he is an Archibald and Doug Moran National Portrait Prize winner whose work sells for tens of thousands on the secondary market.
In the US, gallery co-owner Thorsten Albertz says Quilty is “somebody I need to introduce to my audience”. While whole shows at Albertz Benda can sell out by opening night, on the eve of Quilty’s introduction, “some, but not all” have sold, Albertz says.
The pair have known each other for more than a decade, and while Quilty
acknowledges he must sell paintings to pay off his mortgage, he also felt drawn to show in the US during a political moment that “feels like there’s a lot at stake”. He insists the show is “not didactic” and “each painting is a question”. But he also wanted to have something to say – “maybe as sideline commentary” – in the pivotal midterm election year of Donald Trump’s second term as president.
“I’m obsessed with American politics,” he says, “and I see us often following into the mistakes that they’ve made. “While we refuse to find our own identity, we’re following some wild, wild people down
some weird tracks.” The country also triggers his curiosity about the intersection of masculinity and power, from the embrace of guns, fuel-guzzling trucks and, until earlier on Thursday, ghastly plans to livestream a firing-squad execution.
“I feel my job is to respond to the world,” he says. “I do feel the world. I do feel injustice, and therefore my response often goes into the darker parts of the world.” Quilty says as he becomes more successful, the more he seeks to provoke, but a large show in the works for Melbourne next year might “push it to the limit”. “I often find the works that speak most strongly to the audience aren’t the works that people want to live with. But art is not about beauty; it’s not about feeling relaxed. It can be, but it’s also about horror and sadness and loss.”