Unfinished Business – The Art of Gordon Bennett
Unfinished Business offers fresh insight into the work of Australian artist Gordon Bennett (1955–2014), including new interpretations of his intelligent synthesis of influences and ideas and globally recognised contribution to contemporary art. More than 120 colour reproductions of Bennett’s paintings, installations and video works including not only key series but also a selection of rarely seen works on paper.
Produced in close collaboration with the Estate of Gordon of Bennett, Unfinished Business includes works created from the 1980s to 2014 sourced from studio, public and private collections, including early installation works; Bennett’s ‘history’ paintings; mirror paintings, De Stijl works; his ‘Home décor’ series; ‘Notes to Basquiat’ works; abstract ‘Stripe’ paintings; and late works showing renewed engagement with political contexts. Pages from the artist’s personal notebooks, as well as archival photographs provided by the Gordon Bennett Estate, provide intimate insight into how the artist worked with images and text and used drawing as a generative tool, and convey the connection with international artists in his work.
The publication has been sponsored by the Gordon Darling Foundation.
Publisher Queensland Art Gallery
Date 2020
Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings
Gordon Bennett: Selected Writings is the first publication to survey the writing practice of the late Gordon Bennett (1955-2014), giving vital insight into one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists in his own words. Bringing together nearly forty published and unpublished essays, artist’s statements, letters, and interviews from across Bennett’s nearly thirty-year career, Selected Writings profiles the importance of the written word within his art and broader intellectual practice. Through its focus on Bennett’s written voice, which shifts between scholarly debate, political argument and personal reflections, this publication reveals Bennett considered art and life to be just as entangled as words and images.
Edited by Angela Goddard and Tim Riley Walsh, Selected Writings is co-published by Power Publications, Sydney, and Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane. The book also provides glimpses into Bennett’s personal archive via the reproduction of previously unseen notebooks, correspondence, sketches, preparatory compositions, and more. Offering new knowledge of his creative process, intellectual and artistic influences and professional relationships, this project amplifies Bennett’s already significant contribution to subjects of race and identity in national and global contexts, as well as reaffirming his centrality to postcolonial discourse in the twenty-first century.
Hardcover with colour illustrations.
Publisher Power Publications and Griffith University Art Museum
Date 2020
Gordon Bennett: Be Polite
This publication brings together three newly commissioned essays by art historian Ian McLean and curators and arts writers Helen Hughes and Julie Nagan alongside documentation of Bennett’s works on paper and a selection of paintings and other pieces to which they relate.
Publisher Sternberg Press
Date 2016
Outsider/Insider: The Art of Gordon Bennett
Outsider/Insider: The Art of Gordon Bennett is a substantial catalogue, publish to accompany exhibition by the same title at AAMU, The Netherlands. In addition to images of all the works in the exhibition, presenting a selection from the wide-ranging oeuvre of Gordon Bennett, the catalogue also contains essays by Prof. Ian McLean, Prof. Kitty Zijlmans and Dr Georges Petitjean, curator of the AAMU.
Publisher Snoeck
Date 2012
Gordon Bennett
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.
The catalogue to accompany the exhibition includes a conversation between the artist and long-term associate Bill Wright, as well as thorough analysis of Bennett’s practices and complex body of work to date from Kelly Gellatly, Justin Clemens and Jane Devery.
Publisher National Gallery of Victoria
Date 2007
