Gareth Sansom

Some Old... Some New

29 October - 19 November 2005

Gareth Sansom - Some old... Some New

Shocker turns master by Jeff Makin

The position of Gareth Sansom in the Melbourne art community is ambivalent. To many he is an ageing enfant terrible whose early paintings in the 1960s brought anguish, shock and horror to the bastions of good taste and respectability.

To others, he is one of our unsung middle-generation masters.

Sansom is now a senior citizen and this overdue survey at the Potter begins with those controversial works of the early '60s and, three galleries and 50 works later, ends with his masterly triptych Sweeney Agonistes, painted this year.

In broad terms it is a development from a complex cacophony of heavily layered, semi-figurative painted collage around socio-political, trans-gender themes that, over the years, strips down to bare essentials. It is in one sense the diary of a brush that took the 40-year journey from participant to well-phrased aficionado.
Sansom's early influences included Picasso, Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet and David Hockney.
Two large key works from 1968, The Great Democracy and Tree of my Life, aptly illustrate Sansom's pictorial dexterity as they free-range over cross-dressing, eroticism, pop culture, art-isms and socio-political issues of the day.

In his Great Democracy we see George Washington in continuo across the top of the painting. The American Pop artist Larry Rivers also did a similar thing. Below there's a collaged atomic blast and to the right explicit photographs of radiation burns that illustrate Sansom's protest against the Vietnam War.
In his Tree of my Life the counterplay between the respectable and the unacceptable emerges with this artist as a young man cross-dressing in one corner and playing acceptable cricket in another. So begins the Jekyll and Hyde pictorial play-off that many of Melbourne's matrons loved to hate, and others hated to love.