Ben Quilty
Last Days, 2020
NSW, AUSTRALIA
oil on linen
180 x 202 cm
Quilty doesn’t paint pretty. He paints pain, pressure, protest and the aftermath of all three. Last Days isn’t a polite whisper, it’s a full-body howl. Painted in 2020 (you know, that year), this colossal slab of oil and linen stares straight into the storm and doesn’t blink.
Raw, red, angry - there’s no hiding in these strokes. It’s the end of something. Or maybe the beginning of the reckoning. You can almost hear it scream: the burnt bush, the bodies, the quiet terror of staying home and watching the world unravel on a screen. Quilty’s paint is thick like grief, twisted like memory, bleeding like an open wound.
And yet somehow, there’s hope. A fractured kind, the kind you find when you’ve hit rock bottom and dig anyway. That’s what he does. He digs. Into us. Into himself.