We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
Gordon Bennett / Australia 1955–2014 / Untitled 1991 / Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas / 172 x 220cm / Purchased 1992 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © QAGOMA
Gordon BennettUntitled 1991
Not Currently on Display
Untitled was painted while Gordon Bennett was living and working in France after winning the Moët & Chandon Art Award. The painting reveals a progression beyond his previous works which show a more obvious debt to post-modernist theory and, in particular, to the concept of appropriation.
The work references earlier artists and styles, but these are fused and presented in a more subtle way. The obscure image of a sailing ship being tossed about in a storm is reminiscent of both nineteenth-century French romanticism and particularly Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa 1818–19 (Collection: Musée du Louvre, Paris).
The incorporation of images of Aboriginal heads links this subject with the white invasion of Australia and the subsequent severing of the Aboriginal people from their land and culture. Lines of paint have then been applied over the image in the style of Jackson Pollock who drew inspiration from the artistic traditions of Indigenous American cultures in the western United States.
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.