MICHAEL BENNETT

Michael Bennett artworks

Michael Bennet’s early paintings (c. 2014) are more minimal than those that would follow, being less architectural in references and emphasising a taut picture plane that is looked at, not through. This developed so that pairs of suspended screens, rendered in flat colour or imprinted with sweeping gestural marks, dominated his works, the viewer now encouraged to peer between and beyond presented forms.

Bennett’s chromatically restrained, elegant abstractions of two years later are highly tonal using contrasting vertical rectangular forms, both thick and thin. With the occasional internal horizontal edge gently curving in the background, they spatially interact with the austere gallery architecture—its walls, windows, and doorways especially—suggesting reflected ambient light shining through thinly applied paint.

These paintings (more landscape-derived than constructivist) can be seen as a form of minimalist—and geometric—abstract expressionism; related to the works of Robert Motherwell and Richard Diebenkorn.

Examples of the later abstractions include Wisdom of Stillness (2016); Hazy Shade of Winter (2016); Cosmic Silence (2016); and The Entry (2016).

Works from 2017 (shown online with Benjamin Eck’s Gallery in Munich) are darker, featuring a rich, painterly texture, being less preoccupied with a sense of deep, glowing light, and reasserting a fixed picture plane.

Exhibitions

Michael Bennett has participated in solo and group exhibitions. A recent solo exhibition was Present Tense, Gallery 9, Sydney (2016). A recent group exhibition was New Strokes, Gallery 9, Sydney (2016).

Collections

Michael Bennett’s work is represented in private collections throughout Australia, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Los Angeles, New York, Oslo, Tokyo and Toronto.

John Hurrell | Ocula | 2022