Gareth Sansom

Private collection
Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 2007

(possibly) Warehouse Galleries, Melbourne, November 1975
Ten Caulfield artists, Monash University Exhibition Gallery, 1 - 24 October 1975
Abstraction 6, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 25 October – 17 November 2007, cat. 32 (label on reverse)

Abstraction 6, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, 25 October – 17 November 2007 (illus.)

This work is framed in a brushed aluminium frame. There is a radiating crack to the area of black below the number square. There is blistering to the surface opposite the 'Z!'. This painting has a varied textural and quite rough surface which is consistent with age and the artist's intention. This work is in good condition.
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The precocious and provocative Gareth Sansom has been an enfant terrible for half a century, and shows little sign of aging gracefully. Trained in the early 1960s, he forged his style from elements of British painting – the work of artists such as Francis Bacon, Peter Blake, David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj – and quickly developed an idiosyncratic personal approach mixing figuration and abstraction, drawing, painting and collage, high art and low comedy in rich, composite pop-style arabesques.

With its suggestive-allusive forms – is this a grand piano? Is that a face? Is the other a storm water drain? – the present work typifies 'the ease with which Sansom moves through his teeming, inventive inventory of shapes'¹  to produce a kind of bathetic grandeur. Despite its mash-up of painterly modes, its scratches and dribbles, letters and numbers, its wild fluctuations of scale, its palette of lolly pink, 1970s bathroom green and death-black, Z! has a compelling pictorial integrity; as Deborah Clark has said, 'its apparent elusiveness and chaos is its truth.'²

Dating from the mid 1970s, this is an historically important work, shown at Monash University in 1975 and possibly also included in the artist's critically-acclaimed Warehouse Galleries exhibition of that same year.³  Its companion painting, Figure with double pouch (1975) was acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery in 1986.

1. Jeff Makin, ''Gareth has put in the lot', Sun, 19 November 1975, p. 32
2. Deborah Clark, 'Australian mavericks: the provocative art of Richard Larter and Gareth Sansom', in Lynne Seear and Julie Ewington (eds), Brought to light II: contemporary Australian art 1966-2006 from the Queensland Art Gallery collection, Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery Publishing, 2007, p. 103
3. See Maureen Gilchrist, 'From expressionism back to images' Age, 19 November 1975; Jeff Makin, op. cit.; Alan McCulloch, 'Bizarre force', Herald, 20 November 1975