Jeff Gibson: False Gestalt takes a comprehensive, deep dive into the career of a singular artist, writer and editor whose output has spanned continents and multiple approaches, reflecting and refracting a tangle of images, texts and broader cultural phenomena that Gibson has both generated and embraced over forty years.

The study is written and edited by art historian Wes Hill with critical contributions from key international voices, including Thomas Crow, Susan Best, Tara Heffernan and Angela Goddard. It traces Gibson from his formative years immersed in the Brisbane and Toowoomba punk and new wave scenes, and his excavations of the Pictures Generation, Neo-Pop, and public art in Sydney, to his more recent explorations of typological collage and the countertype, made from precisely cropped, layered, and arranged internet and mass-media imagery.

A senior editor of the influential Art & Text and with an ongoing two-decade tenure as managing editor of Artforum in New York, the artist emerges as both a cultural sponge and a critical mirror, enmeshed wholly in the viewing, making, and discursive wrangling of the image. His artworks are starting points rather than conclusions. Just as we make pictures, pictures make us.

Griffith University Art Museum and Perimeter Editions, 152pp, 25cm x 18cm, illustrated paperback, first edition of 700, 2024