Richard Bell | Dredging up the Past
Richard Bell’s most recent body of paintings, 'Dredging up the Past', continues the artist’s ongoing campaign spotlighting the disempowerment of Indigenous Australians and the politics of Aboriginal emancipation.
Staged at Gertrude Contemporary, the show features works that pose provocative questions about unceded Aboriginal sovereignty. Characteristically, Bell appropriates and subverts visual tropes inherent to the Western canon. In the painting One more hour of daylight, a Madonna and Child motif is transplanted atop a traditional indigenous painting, the ominous title suggesting a metaphorical tussle between daylight ad darkness; white and black. By subverting familiar twentieth century visual vernacular, Bell symbolically offers a new history, and a new canon, to be contemplated.
Many of the works in ‘Dredging up the Past’ are imbued with Bell’s characteristic irreverent humour, such as the painting Great Scott where the artist parodies Roy Lichtenstein’s pop comic-book aesthetic to render a generic satisfied blonde pondering ‘thank Christ I’m not a refugee.’ Here, Bell pitches the persecuted ‘other’ against the egocentrism of Western collective consciousness with a kind of dark humour that makes us both cringe and chuckle.
Yet there is also arguably a more serious sense of political urgency in this show than previous bodies of work, unhinged from satire and subversive wit yet still imbued with the same pervasive anger that drives Bell’s narrative as both activist and artist. In one work, the disposable platitude ‘WE HAVE TO SHARE’ is emblazoned in white words across a layered background of faux-Aboriginal painting and Jackson Pollock-esque dribbles, shining a critical light on the ambiguity of ‘we’. Ultimately, Bell’s large-scale paintings in ‘Dredging up the Past’ demand attention, tacitly delivering strategies toward a more equitable cultural realignment.
EXHIBITION
Richard Bell | Dredging up the Past
2 February – 10 March 2018
Gertrude Contemporary, Vic
Artificial intelligence will be used by young artists who started using it as kids on their phones. They will see it as a natural extension...
This year’s Biennale arrives under more complex circumstances than most. It is shaped by the profound loss of its curator, Koyo Kouoh (1967–2025), whose exhibition...
No artist creates in isolation. Every painting carries traces of the conversations, places and histories that shaped it, preserving within its surface a particular moment...
The weekend markets at Fairfield Showground have been one of Western Sydney’s great institutions for more than fifty years. Fresh fruit and vegetables, children’s clothes,...
In recent times, Yorgos Lanthimos has shifted toward photography, noting in a Guardian interview, 2026, that he needs respite, saying, “it might be a couple...
In Australia, political cartoons were altered by several events during the 1960s: the arrival of Les Tanner’s (1927‒2001) instinctual wit at The Bulletin, Bruce Petty’s...
Recognition of the importance of early bark paintings and their link to the world’s oldest continuing culture, is what makes them both highly sought and...
I had come to see my daughter sing in Deborah Kelly’s Creation Choir and was fortunate enough to make it inside the gallery for the...
Cuban-born, Brisbane-based artist Jorge Mariño Brito’s practice unfolds across two material registers that are best understood not as parallel tracks but as entwined explorations. Both...