Exhibiting this body of work for the first time on the twentieth anniversary of their production in February 2004, Gordon Bennett: Thin Lines features a suite of abstract acrylic paintings on paper, on view ten years after the seminal artist’s untimely passing in 2014.

Throughout this series, Gordon Bennett’s aesthetic drive is one of freedom through abstraction. Thin Lines offloaded the burden of representation ascertained from the more explicitly political paintings of his ‘post-colonial project’ which encompassed the previous seventeen years of his career. For these artworks, Bennett employed geometric abstraction to harness aesthetic qualities of indifference, contradicting the narrow lens of identity through which his works had grown to be seen. This rebuttal through abstraction sought to alleviate the conflation of the artist’s personage with the content of his earlier work, delineating a conceptual distance between the two.

Bennett’s emphasis on materialism in production, along with the precise use of colour and sharp lines to trace the surface of the paper, correlates to a generation of American abstract painters in the 1960s championed by Clement Greenberg. While tethering Thin Lines through latent aesthetic connections to the hard edge, self-referential painting of Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt and Robert Rauschenberg offers few fresh perspectives, Bennett’s engagement in this painting tradition is noteworthy. His adaptation of the materialist, mechanical approach to painting invoked by these artists – whereby perfunctory gestures and mark making is prescribed and dictated by the dimensional limitations of the surface – enabled Bennett to renounce the expectation to perform identity through the embedding of an authorial presence in his practice.