Andy Quilty: FIFO @ Linton and Kay Galleries

Andy Quilty will be presenting his 3^rd solo show, entitled FIFO, with Linton and Kay Galleries, featuring more than 40 works.

FIFO seeks to challenge what Quilty considers the misrepresentation of ‘Fly-in Fly-out’ workers as lazy, frivolous, ‘cashed up bogans’. After undertaking the inaugural Cossack Art Award’s 6 week residency in Pilbara, Quilty became interested in the FIFO mining workforce, finding the people he met to be hardworking and humble in opposition to their negative characterisation as ‘cashed up bogans’.

In an interview with the ABC, he said that the changing fabric of the Western Australian workforce intrigued him.

“The FIFO thing up there is just incredible, I stayed with a friend of mine who’s lived in Karratha his whole life and the change up there’s just phenomenal, 90 per cent of the population now appears to be FIFO up there,” he says. “It’s just such a significant change in the WA working landscape and I’m very interested in the shift of money, now all these working class kind of people are pretty cashed up.”

Quilty’s work interrogates perceptions and representations of the suburban Australian male. He spent 10 years as a surfboard artist in Western Australia and the United States, before pursuing a career in fine art in 2009. Working with ballpoint pen, aerosol and auto enamel paint, Quilty’s art is striking, bold and physically rigorous, with aggressive yet detailed strokes.  FIFO displays the impressive depth of Quilty’s practice, featuring highly detailed ballpoint pen drawings, monumental aerosol and enamel paintings and smaller mixed media works.

Linton and Kay Galleries
November 9 to 22, 2012
(Opening Friday November 9, 6-8pm –  RSVP essential, by Nov 7)

IMAGES:  Cashed up bogan, ballpoint pen, enamel and aerosol on Arches paper, 102 x 66.5cm
Fight night, oil, enamel and aerosol on Arches paper, 35 x 35cm