Gordon Bennett

Gordon Bennett is internationally acclaimed as one of Australia’s most significant and critically engaged contemporary artists. He is recognised for his powerful perspectives on the post colonial experience, particularly in the Australian context, with much of his work mapping alternative histories and questioning racial categorisations and stereotypes. Bennett regularly adopted the persona ‘John Citizen’ as a means of confronting the rhetoric of identity and the politics of categorisation in Australian art. 

Select solo exhibitions: Gordon Bennett: Thin Lines, Sutton Gallery at Melbourne Art Fair, Melbourne, 2024; This World Is Not My Home, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2023; Unfinished Business – The Art of Gordon Bennett, QAGOMA, Brisbane, 2020-2021; Gordon Bennett: Figure of Speech – Sutton Gallery Online, Viewing Room, Melbourne, 2020; Gordon Bennett: Bloodlines, Milani Gallery, Brisbane, 2019; Gordon Bennett: Note Pad Drawings, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, 2019; Gordon Bennett: Be Polite, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Canada, 2015-18; Outsider / Insider: The Art of Gordon Bennett, The Aboriginal Art Museum (AAMU), Utrecht, The Netherlands, 2012; Gordon Bennett: a survey, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane and Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2007.

Select group exhibitions: Thresholds, Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA), Albury, NSW, 2024; Balancing Act, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 2023; Thin Skin, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2023; Espressioni Con Frazioni, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Torino, Italy, 2022; Courage and Beauty: The James C Sourris AM Collection, GOMA, Brisbane, 2022; A Year in Art: Australia 1992, Tate Modern, London, 2021-22; Berlin Biennale, Berlin, 2014; Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, 2012; Afterglow: Performance Art and Photography, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, 2010; Cubism and Australian Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2009; Avoiding Myth and Message: Australian Artists and the Literary World, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2009; 16th Biennale of Sydney: Revolutions – forms that turn, Sydney, 2008; Three Colours: Gordon Bennett and Peter Robinson, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2004.

Artist's CV (PDF)

It is the collapse of the conceptual gap between the binary opposites of self/other, civilized/savage, sophisticated/primitive, or perhaps more appropriately its gradual disintegration and my process of integration, that forms the substratum of my life and work.

Gordon Bennett, The Manifest Toe, 1996
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