Gordon Bennett / Australia 1955–2014 / Triptych: Requiem, Of Grandeur, Empire 1989 / Oil on canvas / Triptych: a: 120 x 120cm; b: 200 x 150cm; c: 120 x 120cm / Purchased 1989 under the Contemporary Art Acquisition Program with funds from Hill and Taylor, Solicitors through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation / © The Estate of Gordon Bennett

Gordon Bennett
Triptych: Requiem, Of Grandeur, Empire 1989

Not Currently on Display

This work unsettles Western aesthetic conventions in resembling the form of a tri-part Christian crucifixion image set in a raw landscape. Grid lines converge at a central vanishing point, foregrounding the system of perspective in Western art. Bennett positions the viewer centrally in order to implicate them in the scene and create a ‘mirror of the world and a mirror of the self’. On close inspection, the sand hills are revealed as human intestines, extrapolated from Bennett’s copy of Colour Atlas of Human Anatomy. This transposition suggests Australia’s bloody colonial history, as well as a close physical bond with the land important to Indigenous people and their spiritual beliefs.

Bennett’s mother appears in the centre as a supplicant or Mary Magdalene figure, her pose lifted from a 1940s Pix news photograph showing her in training for domestic duties. Trugannini, or Trugernanner (c.1812–76), historically and inaccurately described as ‘the last Tasmanian Aborigine’, hovers above the land in the left panel. In the right-hand panel an Aboriginal figure taken from a nineteenth-century ethnographic photograph is placed inside the Arch of Titus, erected in the first century CE during the period of the Jewish diaspora, recalling parallel histories of invasion driven by notions of cultural superiority.

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.