Sutton Gallery is thrilled to present Gordon Bennett: Home Décor (Re)view (after Margaret Preston), an exhibition following Gordon Bennett’s sustained engagement with the work of Australian Modernist artist Margaret Preston (1875-1963). The show traverses a prolific thirteen-year period of Bennett’s career in which Preston’s work introduced formal and conceptual pathways for the artist to pursue, critique, and entangle across several discrete bodies of work. Preston’s appropriated motifs, populist rhetoric, and caricatured misrepresentations of Indigenous Australians were summoned recurrently throughout generative moments of Bennett’s career, invoking the artist’s wider aims of evincing the ideological rigidity underpinning the Modernist spirit, as that which rationalised colonial dispossession and undermined Indigenous cultural production.

Revisiting Preston’s stylised rapprochement of the diverse Indigenous Australian visual cultures, one of Bennett’s first references to Preston’s art appeared in his 1996 series Home Décor (after Margaret Preston), six paintings from which are included in this exhibition. Here, the artist depicted details from Preston’s ‘Australian legend’ print series, her late-career, primitivizing woodcuts that reduced colours and compositions from traditional Aboriginal paintings to depict disparate formal elements from rock art, ceremonies, and body marking. In dialogue with the flattened, alienating quality of this series, Bennett’s suite of square paintings considers the uncanny abstract potential of this formal approach, isolating and reconfiguring these forms into ambiguous compositions that play on the effect of an essentialised, flattened narrative.

Bennett’s Home Décor (Algebra) paintings bring Preston’s ‘Aboriginialist’ figures in dialogue with canonical figure paintings and avant-garde compositional approaches from twentieth-century Western art history. Yoking motifs from Kazimir Malevich, Francis Picabia, and Phillip Guston paintings, Bennett weaves these figures together with Preston’s depictions in the Boogie Woogie lattice grids of Dutch avant garde artist Piet Mondrian’s late New York period. Hybrid works abandoning the purist uniformity of Modernism, this series erodes the oppositional binaries underpinning the myth of progress that characterises the movement. Understood as instruments of colonial control, Bennett seeks out the paradoxical spaces and collapses of the conceptual gaps between representation and abstraction, ‘primitivity’ and civilisation, authenticity and appropriation, self and other. This grid-like structure maps out, entangles, and subjectifies these figures and artworks, forming tableau of the archetypal Modernist system: a language of signs formed around distinctions of race, civilization, and time.

In one of his final bodies of work, Bennett’s widely exhibited series Home Décor (after M Preston) (2009-2013) take the shape of painterly, enlarged versions of Preston’s infamous ‘translations’ of shield patterns that she published in a series of articles in Art and Australia and other periodicals in the mid-late 1920s. Without reference to intention, context, place, or maker, Preston espoused these ‘motifs’ as ripe for decorative use under a misguided notion of a national, modern aesthetic “authentically tethered to place” (see Margaret Preston, ‘Art for crafts: Aboriginal art artfully applied’, The Home, vol.5, no.5, 1 December 1924, pp.30–31). 

Bennett’s cross referencing of Preston’s work resonates not only in a national context concerning issues of authorship and appropriation, but importantly highlights the ways in which he understood representation as formative in the political construction of identity. This exhibition demonstrates the acuity of Bennett’s “deconstructive vein” (Ian McLean, ‘Gordon Bennett’s Home Decor: the Joker in the Pack’, Law Text Culture, vol. 4, 1998, p288.), a (re)view of his rigorous interrogation into, in his words, the “history of ideas, the history of events and spaces between the binary opposites that form their foundation, and which form our sense of ourselves” (Gordon Bennett in Terry Smith ‘Australia’s Anxiety’ History and Memory in the Art of Gordon Bennett, pub. Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, 1999, p19.).