GARETH SANSOM
b. 1939, AustraliaGareth Sansom is one of Australia’s most highly regarded painters and provocateurs; a leading fig- ure of the Australian twentieth-century avant-garde. With an active practice stretching back to the 1960s, Sansom has established a distinctive style of formal abstraction characterised by a punk approach, garish colour palettes, hard-edge geometric forms juxtaposed against figurative ges- tures, and the inclusion of ambiguous text and visual imagery. Merging references to art history, film, literature, philosophy and popular culture with a personal iconography, Sansom’s intuitively formed paintings create a visual complexity that explores physical, psychological and material transformation.
Sansom is an artist and teacher who has placed painting at the centre of his artistic production. He was Head of Painting and then Dean of the School of Art at the Victorian College of the Arts from 1977 until 1991 when he retired to focus solely on his art practice. Throughout a long illustrious career, Sansom has had several retrospective exhibitions, including Transformer at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2017, Gareth Sansom: Welcome to My Mind at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne in 2005, and Gareth Sansom: Paintings 1956–1986, at the Uni- versity Gallery, University of Melbourne in 1986. Sansom’s works are held in numerous public and private collections, nationally and internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Queensland Art Gal- lery of Modern Art, Brisbane.
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