Gordon Bennett — Neo-Expressionism
Gordon Bennett (1955 –2014) was an Australian artist of Aboriginal and Anglo-Celtic descent.
“In the late 1990s Bennett responded to the personal experiences and practice of Puerto-Rican Haitian-American artist Jean-Michael Basquiat by producing a series of paintings that referenced the style and appropriated motifs of Basquiat’s own art. He also wrote an open letter to the dead artist celebrating their cultural and artistic similarities, as well as their shared love of jazz, rap and hip-hop. Bennett conversed about his conceptual painting practice as ‘based on the semiotics of ‘style’ and paint application, images and text, historical and contemporary juxta-position’. His intention in the Notes to Basquiat series is to ‘highlight the similarities and cross-connections of our shared experience as human beings living in separate worlds that each seek to exclude, objectify and dehumanise the black body and person’.
