Education Resource
Advisory Message
Please be advised that some artwork in this exhibition contains graphic material that may not be suitable for all audiences.
Catalogue
Available from exhibition opening at the NGV Shop.
This publication has been supported by the Queensland Government, Australia through the Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and
Export Agency (QIAMEA), Department of the Premier and Cabinet. QIAMEA promotes Queensland’s Indigenous arts industry through
marketing and export activity throughout Australia and internationally.
Gordon Bennett
born Australia 1955
Altered body print (Shadow figure howling at the moon) 1994
synthetic polymer paint and vinyl paint on canvas and synthetic polymer paint on board
(1) 182.0 x 182.0 cm; (2) 59.5 x 59.5 cm x 8.0 cm
The Paul Eliadis Collection of Contemporary Australian Art, Brisbane
© Courtesy of the artist
Photography: Phillip Andrews
Gordon Bennett
born Australia 1955
Notes to Basquiat (The coming of the light) 2001
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
152.0 x 152.0 cm
Collection of the artist, Brisbane
© Courtesy of the artist
Photography: John O’Brien
Gordon Bennett
A National Gallery of Victoria Touring Exhibition
6 September 2007 to 16 January 2008
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
10 May to 3 August 2008
Queensland Art Gallery
December 2008 to February 2009
Art Gallery of Western Australia
Since his first major solo exhibition in 1989, Gordon Bennett has achieved international critical acclaim for the complex ways in which his work engages with historical and contemporary questions of cultural and personal identity, with a specific focus on Australia’s colonial past and its postcolonial present.
Bennett’s idiosyncratic art is founded on his critical enquiry into the power and effects of language to structure ideologies, and social and cultural systems. His work has been guided by a postmodernist aesthetic that has enabled him to deconstruct and represent the histories and politics that determine identities and the national and international social landscapes in which, through his work, he seeks to locate a place for himself.
The exhibition will present twenty years of the artist’s work and will bring together many of the Notes to Basquiat paintings and selected works from the Home Décor series. The exhibition will examine the manner in which Bennett’s focus on the disenfranchisement of colonialism resonates globally beyond his specifically Australian context, and the challenge his work makes to political conservatism and social complacency.
