The exhibition will present four new paintings by Gareth Sansom.
Gareth Sansom is one of Australia’s most highly regarded painters. His work engages with issues of personal identity, sexuality and mortality. A resolutely figurative artist, for over five decades the human body has remained the central motif for his musings on the human condition.
Born in Melbourne in 1939, Sansom studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology from 1959 to 1964. His early paintings, with their raw imagery and suggestive titles, brought Sansom to prominence as one of Melbourne’s most provocative younger artists.The great democracy 1968 is a major work which encapsulates many of the artist’s concerns and aesthetic strategies of this decade. Samson’s juxtaposition of imagery and the incorporation of photographs reflect his interest in British pop artists such as RB Kitaj and David Hockney while the distortion of the figures recalls the work of Francis Bacon, an important early influence. Sansom’s paintings from this decade are marked by a sense of anxiety, a restless mix of eclectic images that refuse easy comprehension.
Opening event: Thursday 14 May 2015, 6 – 8pm
Image: Gareth Sansom, Miss Piggy’s brush with mortality 2014, Oil and enamel on linen, 213 x 274 cm
