Gordon Bennett (artist)

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Gordon Bennett (born 1955) is an Australian aboriginal artist.

Born in Monto, Queensland, of Anglo-Celtic and Aboriginal ancestry, Gordon Bennett grew up in Victoria from the age of four, when his family moved back to Queensland, to the town of Nambour. Bennett left school at fifteen and worked in a variety of trades before beginning formal art studies at the Queensland College of Art, Brisbane (1986-1988). His 1991 painting Nine Ricochets won the prestigious Moët & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship, and he rapidly established himself as a leading figure in the Australian art world. He currently lives and works in Brisbane.

The formative event in Bennett's life was his discovery of his aboriginal identity at the age of eleven. Throughout the 1990s his work consistently explored the Aboriginal experience in White-dominated Australia, frequently in extremely confrontational images documenting murder, rape, and cultural destruction. Yet Bennett has also expressed his discomfort with being seen as spokesman for Aboriginal people, and in a manifesto (or 'manifest toe' as he calls it) published in 1996 he spoke of his wish "to avoid banal containment as a professional Aborigine, which both misrepresents me and denies my upbringing and Scottish/English heritage," while simultaneously expressing his wish that his young daughter could grow up in a society where her life would not be defined by her race.

The National Gallery of Victoria's senior curator of indigenous art, Judith Ryan, calls Bennett "an artist's artist," at the forefront of the artists who work as postmodernists, who comment on art history and respond to the work of other great contemporary artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mondrian and Basquiat (artists whom Bennett frequently quotes in his work). "He has established his own particular style and it's intellectual. It's quite strong and 'in your face'. It is also causing people to question Australia and our identity as a nation and where we are going. He is like no other artist currently working." (The Art of Gordon Bennett, Ian McLean and Gordon Bennett, 1996).

Bennett is represented in most major public collections in Australia as well as in several important overseas collections. He works both in traditional easel paintings and in multi-media.