Gareth Sansom
New Paintings 2007
20 June - 7 July 2007
Gareth Sansom - New Paintings 2007
In Gareth Sansom’s eagerly awaited first major showing since the University of Melbourne’s Potter Museum of Art survey in 2005, he revisits and reinvents some of the themes which have anchored his art for over 45 years – including gender exploration and disguise, juxtapositions of style and art history references – all charged by his signature personal, iconography.
More specifically, in this exhibition, Sansom investigates and plays with the underground, internet-based cult fetish of masking and transformation into rubber dolls via latex body parts; Sax Rohmer’s Doctor Fu Manchu; Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (a film Sansom first saw at the old Savoy cinema in 1962 with Robert Jacks and George Baldessin); Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and the 1494 satirical sighting of ‘Ship of Fools’ in Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff.
In 2006, Sansom moved into a large new studio in Sorrento – the largest he has ever occupied – and many of the paintings in this exhibition have been painted in this new daylight-filled space. This has been somewhat of a revelation to him as much of his past work has been executed at night under artificial light in a cramped inner-city studio. Paradoxically, perhaps, the last four paintings – and the largest works in this exhibition – were painted back in Melbourne, mostly at night, in his original studio.
In his 68th year, Sansom shows no sign of slowing down and his now widely-acknowledged reputation as one of the most original and exciting painters of his generation continues to grow apace. He is to be included in a major exhibition, Focus on Australian Art to be curated by John Stringer for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in September; he is a finalist in the Arthur Guy Memorial Prize in the Bendigo Art Gallery in June and he will also participate in Eye to I at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery in August. Major works have recently been acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery.
This will be Sansom’s seventh exhibition with John Buckley since 2000.
John Buckley
2007