Ben Quilty revisits Australian landscapes in a new Melbourne exhibition
The National Gallery of Victoria has announced Ben Quilty: The Unimpressionist for March 2027. More than 80 new and recent works connect the legacy of Australian Impressionism with environmental loss. Alongside paintings and watercolours, the Melbourne exhibition includes a transformed Ford Mustang and a forest made from reused furniture.
Arts··Morning
A landscape tradition is reconsidered
The National Gallery of Victoria will present Ben Quilty: The Unimpressionist at Melbourne’s Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia from March 25 to September 19, 2027. The exhibition brings together more than 80 new and recent works, including paintings, watercolours, sculpture and large installations. Quilty returns to Australian Impressionist landscapes through works addressing environmental loss. A seven-metre painting reworks Arthur Streeton’s 1896 landscape The purple noon’s transparent might.[1], [2]
Wet canvases produce a mirrored image
For Clapped Out: Rorschach after Streeton, Quilty presses wet canvases together to make mirrored compositions. In The Reckonings, he paints over secondhand reproductions of Streeton landscapes. Returning to the original viewpoints, he adds contemporary urban sprawl and land degradation. The exhibition also includes watercolours made during a 2023 journey to Antarctica with his son.[1]
Sculptures connect cars, birds and forests
Reverb transforms a Ford Mustang into an undriveable sculpture, with calls from an Antarctic penguin colony in a soundscape made with Philip Samartzis. The Wastelands sets hundreds of taxidermied birds among a forest constructed from reused antique red cedar furniture. Another sculpture reproduces an eight-metre-wide stump from a felled Tasmanian tree, using a three-dimensional scan and recycled white plastic.[1]
