This August we are presenting an exhibition of new works by Gareth Sansom. The exhibition runs across Galleries 1 & 2. It consists of new paintings and works on plywood made between 2021-23.
Gareth Sansom is an artist, teacher and provocateur who has placed painting at the centre of his artistic production. A major figure in the Australian avant-garde moment, he is known for merging themes of pop-culture, personal iconography, sex and sexual transgression and film through his psychological landscape and 20th-century abstraction.
Sansom was appointed Head of Painting at the Victorian College of the Arts from 1977–1985, and Dean School of Art at the Victorian College of the Arts from 1986–1991. He was an artist-in-residence at the University of Melbourne in 1985, when he resumed his full-time painting practice with a series of large works on canvas. He held a retrospective, Gareth Sansom: Paintings 1956–1986, at the University Gallery, University of Melbourne in 1986, Gareth Sansom: Welcome to My Mind at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne in 2005 and Gareth Sansom: Transformer at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, in 2017.
Selected group exhibitions include Today Tomorrow Yesterday, MCA, Sydney (2016); Painting. More Painting, ACCA, Melbourne (2016); Magic Object, Adelaide Biennial, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2016); POP to Popism, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2014); Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2013); Visions Past and Present, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne (2012); Artwork to Tapestry, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Victoria (2011); We Call Them Pirates Out Here, MCA, Sydney (2010); Gallery A Sydney 1964–1983, Campbelltown Arts Centre, NSW and Newcastle Art Gallery, NSW (2009); Preserving the Past, Enriching the Future – Hugh Williamson’s Legacy, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2008); and Cross Currents: Focus on Australian Art, MCA, Sydney (2007).
Sansom’s works are held in numerous public and private collections, nationally and internationally, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane.
Image: Gareth Sansom, ‘A prophet’s delicate dilemma’, 2023, Oil and enamel on linen, 183 x 244 cm
