Gordon Bennett

Biography

In 1991 the painting “Nine Ricochets” won Gordon Bennett the Moët & Chandon fellowship, one of the most prestigious art awards in Australia. He had graduated from the Queensland College of Art in Brisbane three years earlier, and after this prize his name quickly became one of the prominent ones in Australian art.

Before his studies there had been a long life outside art. Bennett was born on 8 October 1955 in Monto, Queensland; his ancestors included Aboriginal people of the Birri Gubba and Darumbal nations as well as settlers from the British Isles. From the age of four he grew up in Victoria; later the family returned to Queensland, to the town of Nambour, where he went to high school. At fifteen he left school and worked in several trades before entering the college in 1986.

He lived and worked in Brisbane, painting, making prints and working across different media. Some of his works are connected with what he saw as a child. Racism in Australia remains a constant theme in his work.

In 1996 he published a manifesto, which he jokingly called his “manifest toe”, and in it he refused the role of spokesman for all Aboriginal people. To be a “professional Aborigine”, he wrote, meant misrepresenting himself and denying his upbringing and his Scottish and English heritage. In the same breath he confessed his hope that his young daughter would grow up in a society where a person’s life would not be defined by their race. I think this double move is the key to his paintings: he would not let the viewer file him under any single heading.

There were many exhibitions. In 1999 Brisbane City Gallery showed “History and Memory in the Art of Gordon Bennett”, and the exhibition travelled to Birmingham, Bristol and Norway. In 2004, together with Peter Robinson, he made the exhibition “Three Colours”, which toured several galleries in Victoria, among them the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bendigo and Ballarat. In 2007 the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne mounted a survey exhibition that set his works on colonialism in an international context; it then went to Brisbane and Perth. That same year the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge held his exhibition “The Expiation of Guilt”, marking the bicentenary of the act abolishing the slave trade. He took part in biennales in Sydney, Venice, Gwangju, Shanghai, Prague and Berlin, and in 2012 the Aboriginal Art Museum in Utrecht showed a solo exhibition of his work.

Judith Ryan, a curator at the National Gallery of Victoria, called him “an artist’s artist” in 2004 and saw in his painting traces of Pollock, Mondrian and Basquiat.

Gordon Bennett died in Brisbane on 3 June 2014, at the age of fifty-eight. His works are in most of the major public collections in Australia, including the Queensland Art Gallery. In September 2017 his 1991 painting “Possession Island” was unveiled at Tate Modern in London.