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Press Release
June 2009
Gareth Sansom has never skirted controversy, but tackling both God and the Grim Reaper in the one show is sure to raise eyebrows.
This, Sansom’s eighth show at the John Buckley Gallery, reveals an artist at the height of his powers.
Death, sex, religion, erections, UFOs, graffiti, alchemy, the Crucifix, time, S&M, ghosts, skulls, nuns, vampires and the apocalypse are just some of the themes touched upon. Cultural references abound; The Seventh Seal, Vorticism, The Flintstones, Cubism, Kandinsky, Beowulf, Jack the Ripper, Paul Klee, Psycho, Francis Bacon and skateboards all make an appearance.
Writing on Sansom’s work for The Australian in 2007, respected art critic Sebastian Smee stated: “for my money the most exciting painter in Australia today.” With his work residing in all of Australia’s major private and public collections the curators and collectors clearly agree.
Sansom held his first show in 1959 and has shown regularly since. In 1991 he represented Australia in the Seventh Triennale in New Delhi, India and in 2005 The Ian Potter Museum of Art held a major survey of his work, stunning audiences with the bravura range of styles and subjects. In 2008, Sansom was awarded the John McCaughey Memorial Prize, recognising the lifetime achievement of an Australian artist. In his seventieth year the vibrancy of his paintings communicates that of a fresh energetic youngster executed and imbued with the art-historical and life experiential references of a seasoned professional who is at the top of his game. As described by the NGV’s Dr Alex Baker on awarding Sansom the prize, "The balance between figuration and abstraction, the self-investigatory aspect of the work, the psychedelic aspect, all really hit me as being very much of the moment...I think younger artists should really look at this guy's work to understand what's going on in contemporary painting."
Sansom’s strange, malformed, but ultimately beautiful works here represent a visual lexicon that is breathtaking in scope and yet weirdly intimate and seductive in effect. Writing in the catalogue essay for the show, critic Ashley Crawford describes the exhibition as “a Library of Alexandria compiled by a psychotic then soothed with colour therapy…. This is not an exhibition for the faint hearted, but if it were it would not be a Gareth Sansom exhibition.”
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