Richard Bell

Richard Bell works across a variety of media including painting, installation, performance and video. One of Australia’s most significant artists, Bell’s work explores the complex artistic and political problems of Western, colonial and Indigenous art production. He grew out of a generation of Aboriginal activists and has remained committed to the politics of Aboriginal emancipation and self-determination. In 2003 he was the recipient of the Telstra National Aboriginal Art Award, establishing him as an important Australian artistic figure. Bell is represented in most major National and State collections, and has exhibited in a number of solo exhibitions at important institutions in Australia and overseas.

Bell’s painting View from the MCA (2008) depicts the Sydney Opera House, an iconic and enduring image of Australian national identity. Such icons are instantly recognisable, even as a subtracted silhouette. But Bell reminds us of what is less visible in the picture now, what happened on this site centuries before, before the Opera House or the Museum of Contemporary Art where established. When the First Fleet landed in 1788, port Jackson was picked as the site for a British settlement, symbolising the advent of colonialism in Australia. View from the MCA is taken from the position of the First Fleet’s landing in 1788, where the Museum of Contemporary Art now stands. Rendered in a mechanical ‘dot’ technique that references both pop aesthetics and western desert painting, and with an aboriginal flag pitched atop the Opera House, the work postulates the reclamation of Bennelong point, an ancient sacred site for the Eora nation.

Bell is not afraid to pull back the curtain on Australia, to “speak truth to power”.¹ He reminds us of what lies beneath our most ubiquitous images, in this work painting with the gestures of pop art that he explored in the 2000s, as befits the Opera House’s notoriety. Bell’s invocation of the languages of modernism “subverts the colonial aesthetic paradigm”, calling into question how what we take for granted as ‘authentic’ and ‘original’ in Western art is often stolen from someone else.² There is no pardon for the art world from Bell, who instead implicates museums and galleries in their frequent roles as ancillary sites of colonisation.

In 2021, The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, staged a retrospective exhibition of Bell’s work. View from the MCA featured prominently in the exhibition and is reproduced in the catalogue. 2022 sees Bell undertaking some of his most ambitious projects to date, with work exhibited at documenta 15, and solo projects at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Italy, and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands. In mid-2023, Bell will unveil a major solo project at the Tate Modern, London.

¹ Maura Reilly, “Speaking Truth to Power,” in Richard Bell: You Can Go Now (Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2021, 33, exhibition catalogue.

² Daniel Browning, “Decolonising Now: The Activism of Richard Bell,” in Richard Bell: Lessons on Etiquette and Manners (Melbourne: Monash University Museum of Art, 2013), p. 24.