The painting depicts Ben Roberts-Smith, an awardee of the Victoria Cross for Australia, in camouflage uniform demonstrating holding and aiming a pistol.

The Australian War Memorial subsequently placed a strong focus on Roberts-Smith and his story, including commissioning Pistol Grip for its collection.

As a result, Pistol Grip, along with other items related to Roberts-Smith became a point of contention regarding the role of museums and the meaning and purpose of war art.

[4] in 2018, Australian journalists Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe named Roberts-Smith as one of the persons alleged to have committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

[7] Senator David Shoebridge called for the removal of some of these items from the collection "to begin telling the entire truth of Australia’s involvement in that brutal war.

I’m not drawn to art that does that.As at 2024, the Australian War Memorial continues to display the items, including Pistol Grip, noting the court case was only one step in a larger process.

The Memorial acknowledges the gravity of the decision in the Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG defamation case and its broader impact on all involved in the Australian community ... We are considering carefully the additional content and context to be included in these displays.Kit Messham-Muir, Professor in Art at Curtin University describes Pistol Grip as a "complex work"; one that shows "how we create the nation through the stories we tell ourselves, and how dynamic that narrative can be.

"[7] Rex Butler and Paris Lettau—the latter a former fellow at the Australian War Memorial— unfavourably compared Zavros' work to Marcus Wills' Corporal Cameron Stewart Baird VC MG, another portrait of a Victoria Cross winner (Cameron Baird) commissioned by the Australian War Memorial – "the unwitting and defensive subject of unknown forces around him."

By contrast, Butler and Lettau describe Zavros' painting sarcastically as a "[masterpiece] of sorts ... outstanding [example] of our ideological end times and the emptying out of all moral, political, and artistic values" It’s threatening, over-bearing, macho, hypermasculine, celebratory, and enormous, like the man himself—some 220 centimetres wide and 160 centimetres highThe painting was commissioned directly by the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and remains part of its collection.