Gordon Bennett

Gordon Bennett was one of the leading artists of his generation and received widespread recognition internationally for his striking . Born in 1955 in Monto, Queensland, Bennett was unaware of his mother’s Aboriginal heritage until he was a teenager. After Bennett’s death in 2014, his contemporary Richard Bell wrote that this “triggered an identity crisis” and led Bennett on a lifelong journey to understand his roots and the systematic erasure inflicted on his family by Australian colonialism (Richard Bell, “Gordon Bennett”, The Guardian, 14 June 2014). Coming to art in his thirties after a career as a Telecom linesman, Bennett’s works combined political commentary and postmodern appropriation in new and daring ways.

But Bennett bluntly rejected interpretations of his life and work that pigeonholed him as an “Aboriginal” artist, a point made in his tongue-in-cheek Non-Performance (1992-2014), a “performance” comprised of twenty-one years of “systematic non-participation in public lecture programs within Australia”. In the late-1990s, Bennett appropriated Jean-Michael Basquiat in a series of paintings that drew parallels between the Puerto-Rican and Haitian-American artist and Bennett’s own experience as an Aboriginal Australian. In an open letter to Basquiat, which doubled as an address to his viewing public, Bennett wrote:

“To some, writing a letter to a person post-humously may seem very tacky and an attempt to gain some kind of attention, even 'steal' your 'crown'. That is not my intention, I have had my own experiences of being crowned in Australia, as an 'Urban Aboriginal' artist – underscored as that title is by racism and 'primitivism' - and I do not wear it well. My intention is in keeping with the integrity of my work in which appropriation and citation, sampling and remixing are an integral part, as are attempts to communicate a basic underlying humanity to the perception of 'blackness' in its philosophical and historical production within western cultural contexts.” (Gordon Bennett, Notes to Basquiat: One Tense Moment (episode two), Sherman Galleries, Sydney, 1999 exh. cat.) 

The largest exhibition of Bennett’s work, Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett, Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2020-21) was held posthumously and featured 200 paintings, sculptures, video works and ceramic pieces. In 2016, his work Possession Island (Abstraction) (1991) was purchased jointly by Tate, London, United Kingdom, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.