After setting a new auction record for Ben Quilty in March with a painting of a burly budgerigar, Menzies is banking on the Sydney artist’s popularity and selling no fewer than four Quilty works in its second sale for the year next Wednesday night.
Quilty has been given cover status again, this time with a far tougher work than the budgie painting, Beast 2, 2005, which sold for $220,000 (hammer) in March, against an estimate of $35,000 to $45,000. It’s fair to say that Quilty’s Skull 3, 2006, estimated at $120,000 to $160,000, is a little less easy on the eye. Quilty’s Toranas, Falcons, and other cars with grunt beloved by suburban boys are popular with collectors, but Skull 3 is a menacing, anthropomorphic mini-van, fang-toothed and hollow-eyed, which nonetheless continues to probe the artist’s principal theme of troubled masculinity. One for die-hard fans perhaps.
