Gordon BENNETT

Leading Australian contemporary artist, Gordon Bennett was based in Brisbane before he passed unexpectedly in 2014. His artworks are bold and ballsy, challenging racism and inhumane acts and calling for the viewer to reflect on Australia's tainted past and sense of national identity. Bennett actively rejected racial stereotypes and he refused to be categorised as a First Nations artist (although his birth-right) creating an alter ego, John Citizen, who he described as: "an abstraction of the Australian Mr Average, the Australian Everyman." From the late 1990s, Bennett began a dialogue with the work of New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who shared a similar western cultural tradition and obsession with drawing, semiotics and visual language. Bennett wrote in a 1992 travelling government-sponsored Australian art exhibition catalogue:

"I am an indigenous Australian. My mother is an indigenous Australian and her mother before that and so on for countless generations. My father was English. My work comes out of small town and suburban Australia. I was socialised into an essentially Anglo-Saxon society where attitudes to indigenous people still seemed entrenched to a social Darwinist level. From cocktail parties to workplace parties, predominantly derogatory opinions are exchanged about indigenous people with unquestioning ease and assurance.”