The Art Gallery of South Australia today announces Quilty, the first major survey exhibition in a decade of one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, Ben Quilty. Developed by the Art Gallery of South Australia and curated by co-Acting Director Lisa Slade, the exhibition will be unveiled in Adelaide on 2 March 2019 before a year of touring to the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Lisa Slade, Curator, Quilty and Co-Acting Director, Art Gallery of South Australia says ‘The exhibition presents a portrait of a socially engaged contemporary artist who is committed to art’s capacity to instigate change. Quilty’s subjects are never objectified, but always rendered through the lens of personal experience.

The exhibition extends from Quilty’s early reflections on the initiation rituals performed by young Australian men to his experience as an official war artist in Afghanistan and his campaign to save the lives of Bali Nine pair Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. The exhibition also includes works inspired by Quilty’s visits with author Richard Flanagan to Lebanon, Lesbos and Serbia, his revisions of the Australian landscape, and raw, intimate portraits of himself, his family and his friends.