Richard Bell Scratch an Aussie

Whether paintings, performances, videos or T-shirts, Richard Bell's works of protest, confront and unsettle common ideas about Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians' relationship 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 racsism 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 stereotypical Australians are psycoanalysed by the artist, who charades as a black Sigmund Freud.

2008 Biennale of Sydney Guide, p. 13.