Richard Bell: Uz Vs. Them

A self-taught artist, Richard Bell works in a wide range of media, including painting, performance, and video. He freely borrows styles and motifs from other artists, periods, and cultures. Visual references invoking the dot matrixes and expressionist drips of Aboriginal desert paintings, the Pop art styles of Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, and the paint drips of Jackson Pollock are juxtaposed with text to create powerful political and social commentary. Politicized at an early age, the artist merged his activism into artmaking in the late ‘80s, first making “tourist” art and then art about, as he describes it, “the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of Aboriginal people.” Bell still sees himself as “more an activist than an artist.”