The recuperation

Ben Quilty’s empathetic but unflinching rendering of human appetites, vulnerabilities and depravities serves as both admonition and catharsis. Responding to the political and social culture in which we find ourselves, his work taps into moral and ethical questions that have long been the concern of philosophy and art, with an urgent contemporary resonance.
‘The recuperation’ builds upon a motif developed in Quilty’s recent practice in which the portrait embodies both internal and external forces. In these, the human head becomes dissolved and unfixed, presenting the psyche of the subject with insistent graphic emphasis.
These nightmarish heads of flayed flesh, bulging eyes and protruding extremities are at once decisive and disorientating, ethereal and of the flesh, a reflection of both individual and universal human experience. The state of the world today is as much the subject of this drawing as any individual human it may suggest.