Free Fall places Ben Quilty's heavily abstracted, tortured anatomies inside the UFC Octagon, using the brutality of mixed martial arts to interrogate the same cultural anxieties that erupted on a Sydney beach during the 2005 Cronulla riots.
About This Book
Quilty's Free Fall series finds its lineage in American realist George Bellows, whose early twentieth-century boxing paintings treated the ring as a theatre of social tension. Quilty inherits that framework and redirects it toward the Ultimate Fighting Championship — a spectacle no less ritualised, no less freighted with masculine mythology. What makes this body of work formally and conceptually striking is its dual source: Quilty was simultaneously studying Bellows and confronting documentary images of the Cronulla riots, shot by photojournalist Andrew Quilty. The beach and the Octagon emerge as parallel arenas — sites of friction, performance, and coded violence — rendered through painting's capacity to hold contradictions that photography cannot.
Key Features
- 108 pages of paintings exploring abstracted figuration, combat, and cultural violence
- Photographs of the 2005 Cronulla riots by photojournalist Andrew Quilty cited as a formative source
- Published by Penguin, 2005
What You'll Discover
- How Quilty positions the UFC Octagon as a contemporary equivalent to Bellows' boxing arena — a culturally loaded space where bodies become symbols
- The formal relationship between abstracted anatomy and the physical extremity of combat, and what that distortion reveals about representation and violence
- The conceptual link Quilty draws between the sporting spectacle and the Cronulla riots — two zones of ritual, tribalism, and bodily conflict collapsed into a single pictorial investigation
- The way photojournalism and painting function as interlocutors in Quilty's process, each informing the other's approach to depicting confrontation
About the Author
Ben Quilty is an Australian painter whose work consistently engages with masculinity, trauma, and national identity through figurative and semi-abstract painting. His practice draws on art historical precedent — here, the realism of George Bellows — while remaining firmly grounded in the particulars of contemporary Australian culture.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 108
- Dimensions: 285 x 228 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781761046834
- Publisher: Penguin
- Publication Date: 2005
Perfect For: Collectors and students of Australian contemporary painting, those interested in the intersection of sport, masculinity, and visual culture, and readers drawn to art that engages seriously with art historical precedent.