Exhibition · Albertz Benda · New York
New York, NY | albertz benda is proud to present Devil/God, the first solo exhibition in New York by Australian artist, Ben Quilty. On view from October 15 – November 14, 2026, the exhibition explores Quilty’s visual language between the personal and the cultural. “It was a howl in which pain, anger, menace, and the outraged majesty of Nature all blended into one hideous shriek. For a full minute it lasted, a thousand sirens in one, paralyzing all the great multitude with its fierce insistence… No sound in history has ever equaled the cry of the injured Earth." In Arthur Conan Doyle's odd 1928 short story "When the World Screamed" Professor Challenger, a man of science and modernity, hypothesizes that the earth is a sentient being, and we live on its surface like parasites. To test his notion, he organizes to drill through to the earth's mantle, stab the earth and provoke it to show itself. Challenger succeeds in making the earth scream, triggering violent earthquakes all over the world; however, the story ends with no one, including Conan Doyle, seeming to have understood the implications of this convulsion. Challenger stands proudly before the world, a scientist who has proven that he is both the greatest of men and the most irritating of insects. A century later, the scream of the earth is something we can now hear around us all the time, as the planetary systems that sustain life are pushed to breaking by all the proud little men of science, industry and politics. Ben Quilty is an Australian artist known for large-scale, heavily impastoed paintings, and installations in which materiality has an uneasy relationship to image or concept. He is well known in Australia not just as an artist but as a social commentator and activist, and it is impossible to separate the artist from the agitator and public persona. Quilty uses an expressionist or confessional language to give form to the visceral, intimate and deeply human experience of our collective crises of…