• Richard Bell
  Scratch an Aussie, 2008
  Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
  

Whether paintings, performances, videos or T-shirts, Richard Bell’s works protest, confront and unsettle common ideas about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians’ relationships to each other, to this country’s history and to art itself. His paintings play with the practice of appropriation, often mining the pop art styles of Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, or the paint drips of Jackson Pollock, while including texts that complicate the way we think about racism and race politics in Australia. ‘Aboriginal Art – it’s a white thing’ is one of the artist’s famous ‘Theorems’, in which he accuses the contemporary art world of manipulating and exploiting Aboriginal art. For the Biennale of Sydney, Bell has created a new video installation in which prominent Australians are psychoanalysed by the artist, who charades as a black Sigmund Freud.

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