Ben Quilty (b.

1973) is an Australian artist who grew up in semi-rural suburban

north-west Kenshurst, where car hoon culture was a proving ground for self-worth
and masculinity, and where racing cars and excessive drinking became an
entrenched rite of passage for male youth. Quiltys responses to the world of his
youth have challenged viewers to contemplate notions of culture, identity, and
the glorification of decline that is present in Australian culture. Quiltys works
have often demonstrated the self-destructive nature of Australian males, and so
accepting he Australian War Memorials official war artist commission seemed
like a logical step in the progression of his career (After Afghanistan).
Quilty found Afghanistan to be full of dangers, challenging his usual irreverent
approach which has often masked the seriousness of his subject matter. His work
Kandahar (2011) captures the tension and fear that underlined his own personal
experience in Afghanistan, depicting the process of was as a maelstrom of
conflicting energies, which aggressively interact within the thickly applied
impasto paint. He included the purple hued mountains in the background, which
had an overwhelming presence in the landscape; this inclusion is reflective of his
initial visceral response to the experience of being in a war zone.
Quiltys portraiture has solely been about communicating an emotional
relationship with the subject, which he intended to capture through
photographing Australian soldiers staring up into the sun, symbolic of the
immense and overwhelming challenge of war which they face daily. In his studio
back home, he used these photographs and the sitters to articulate the
individual soldiers experiences, souls and raw emotions, rather than the
landscape of war of captured moments in time.
Unlike other war paintings, Quiltys portraits are not a political comment on the
war in Afghanistan, but rather his own subjective comprehension of the emotions
he encountered by interacting with the Australian soldiers there. For instance,
the subject of Troy Park, after Afghanistan, no.2 (2012) is shown in a contorted
pose which echoes the soldiers own emotional experiences during the war, and
the implications of war such as PTSD; it doesnt serve as an anti-war icon.

SIGNS, CODES ANS SYMBOLS:

The nakedness of the bodies captures their sheer physicality and

presence, as well as the frailty of human skin and the darkness of the
emotional weight of war. Also symbolises vulnerability, but in the portrait
of the female who chose her pose, strength.
The sprawled poses and outstretched arms symbmolise the exhaustion
and the need to recuperate expereicned by the Australians in Afghanistan,
as they prepare for teir next deployment.
The large black tumble weed looking abstract is symbolic of the extreme
feelings about the smell, sound and emotions of being in Afghanistan,
sucked into the vortex of a giant war machine