Notes to Basquiat (The coming of the light)
©
All rights reserved
Gordon Bennett 2001 Australia
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas. 152.0 x 152.0 cm. Collection of the artist, Brisbane. Photography: John O’Brien
Gordon Bennett
A National Gallery of Victoria Touring Exhibition
Art Gallery of Western Australia
Thursday 01 January 2009 to Sunday 22 March 2009
Exhibition
previously on
at
Art Gallery of Western Australia
in
Perth precinct,
Western Australia,
Australia
Since his first major solo exhibition in 1989, Gordon Bennett has achieved international critical acclaim for the complex ways in which his work engages with historical and contemporary questions of cultural and personal identity, with a specific focus on Australia’s colonial past and its postcolonial present.
Bennett’s idiosyncratic art is founded on his critical enquiry into the power and effects of language to structure ideologies, and social and cultural systems. His work has been guided by a postmodernist aesthetic that has enabled him to deconstruct and represent the histories and politics that determine identities and the national and international social landscapes in which, through his work, he seeks to locate a place for himself.
The exhibition will present twenty years of the artist’s work and will bring together many of the Notes to Basquiat paintings and selected works from the Home Décor series. The exhibition will examine the manner in which Bennett’s focus on the disenfranchisement of colonialism resonates globally beyond his specifically Australian context, and the challenge his work makes to political conservatism and social complacency.
Location
Art Gallery of Western AustraliaPerth Cultural Centre, Perth 6000.
Perth Precinct
Western Australia
Australia
