Gordon Bennett / Australia 1955–2014 / Self portrait #8 2003 / UV inkjet print on photographic paper / 72.5 x 61cm, 54 x 54cm (comp.) / Purchased 2005. The Queensland Government’s special Centenary Fund / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Estate of Gordon Bennett

Gordon Bennett
Self portrait #8 2003

Not Currently on Display

Self portrait #8 belongs to a series of self portraits by Gordon Bennett from 2003–04 where the artist inserts himself, quite literally, into a twentieth-century history of European or white portraiture.

Andrew Sayers suggests some of the key motivations of the self-portrait, which Bennett’s works deconstruct but also affirm:

Sometimes the self-portrait is undertaken as an artistic exercise, sometimes as self-affirmation. It can be a statement of professional allegiance, the expression of a relationship or a construction of identity. The self-portraits of Gordon Bennett are exemplary in this regard: the artist creates a complex layering of allusion with which he reflects on his own position as a professional artist. . .1

In ‘Self portraits #1-8’, Bennett literally ‘dissolves’ his portrait in a swirling mass of movement. In the later portraits (#11, 14, 17, 23, 36, 37 and 42), the artist makes more pointed gestures at European — often white Australian — artists and histories, picturing himself in Roy Lichtenstein Ben Day dots or in the manner of the young Scott Redford. All Bennett’s works are deeply personal and address issues that illustrate the fluidity and complexity of identity. The artist has stated: ‘My approach is very personal. You might even say that every work to date has been a self-portrait. . .’2

Endnotes:

1. Andrew Sayers. ‘The artist’s self-portrait in Australia’, in To look within: Self portraits in Australia. The University of Queensland Art Museum, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, 2004, pp.32-33.
2. Gordon Bennett, quoted in Gabriella Coslovich. ‘Bennett puts on a brave face’. The Age, 28 Apr. 2004, <http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/04/27/1082831550074.html>, viewed April 2004.

Gordon Bennett was born in 1955 in the central Queensland town of Monto. Bennett ‘discovered’ his Aboriginality at the age of eleven. The explicit imagery in his paintings concentrates on his Indigenous heritage, the Eurocentric schooling he experienced, the subjectivity of history, patriarchal knowledge systems and racism.

Bennett attended the Queensland College of Art in Brisbane and completed a Fine Arts Degree in 1988. He had already begun exhibiting his large, semi-autobiographical paintings the previous year in group exhibitions at THAT Contemporary Art Space in Brisbane and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

From the time he graduated from art college, Bennett’s work displayed a high level of maturity and a clear sense of direction, but it also flagged his intention to resist certain expectations or categorisations of him as a particular ‘kind’ of artist. He remained uncomfortable with terms such as ‘urban’ or Aboriginal artist, for example, throughout his career, as he consistently drew on imagery and references from Indigenous and Western approaches to art, rather than a preference for one over the other.