THERE IS something about Gordon Bennett's painting that is unique and angrily refreshing. He says, "If I were to choose a single word to describe my art practice it would be the word 'question'.
If I were to choose a single word to describe my underlying drive it would be 'freedom' - Freedom is practice.

"It is a way of thinking in other ways to those we have become accustomed to."

These words open the catalogue to the exhibition and they truly reflect the work displayed.

Born in Queensland in 1955 but raised largely in Victoria, Gordon Bennett was unaware of his Aboriginal ancestry until he was 11. But he does not want to be pigeonholed as an "Aboriginal" artist.

He worked as a tradesman for telecom for over a decade before enrolling in an art course in Queensland at the age of 30. He is now one of Australia's most challenging and interesting artists, whose work, no doubt, makes John Howard and other 'history war' right-wingers cringe.

John Citizen

This major retrospective exhibition comprises 85 works. It brings together work from 1988 to the present.

His work is overtly political, often using words on his paintings surface on top of images of extermination, colonialisation and violence.

Works that particularly affected me were the Home sweet home series 1993-1994.

They are not as graphic as others but they talk of child-abuse, violence and poverty.

For example in Freedom fighters (1990), he shows chained Aborigines, deposited arbitrarily over a red landscape, which is inscribed with incongruous trick perspective boxes.

The geometric corners are given letters indicating the planned nature of European vision and invasion, the loss of indigenous language, and the socialisation into a "white" world.

It is hard when looking at Bounty Hunters (1991) at his depiction of atrocities not to feel confronted and deeply unsettled, but it is as it should be.

These and other works, such as Self-Portrait: Interior/Exterior (1993), have been interpreted as exploring issues of racism and colonial cultures. Even though there are puzzles and artistic tricks, Bennett's clear expression of deep injustice is always understood.

In 1995 as an act of liberation from the label "Aboriginal art", Bennett called himself "John Citizen" and painted as an "average" Australian.

He does not do interviews but in an emailed response to the Sydney Morning Herald he replied to a question that he most wished for his 12-year-old daughter, Caitlin, to never have to endure racism.

Although this exhibition is mainly paintings, Bennett's art practice encompasses painting, photography, printmaking, video, performance and installation.

My favourite painting is Double Vision, one of his most colourful and expressive of the Notes to Basquiat series. It is two skeletal heads, a black and a pink, "speaking" both words and yellow-red streams at each other.

Notes to Basquiat (The coming of the light) is about 9/11 and it carries over his theme of dispossession, even imperialism, and its resulting effects.

Bennett's recent "Camouflage" series (2003) talks about the war in Iraq. Some of them are set against a background design derived from the inside papers of the Koran, and painted during the year the Coalition the Willing staged the Iraq War.

Bennett's art confronts racism, confronts dispossession and confronts complacency. Have a look.

Melanie Lazarow

Gordon Bennett
A National Gallery of Victoria Touring Exhibition
Until January 16, 2008
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne