Something Terrible, Something Lovely by William Sansom

During that conflict many modernist writers – such as Graham Greene, Louis MacNeice, David Jones, J. But from the outbreak of the Second World War what had been an aesthetic mode began to resemble a proleptic template. They appeared as content, with visions of tottering towers and scraps of paper and also as form, in the shapes of broken poetics. Yet throughout the years prior to the Second World War, British culture was already filled with ruins and fragments. Drawings.From fires to ghosts, and from flowers to surrealist apparitions, the bombsites of London were both unsettling and inspiring terrains. Group Show, The 1980–1990 show, A Selection of Work from our Stockroom Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2007 Gareth Sansom Cross Currents: Focus on Australian art National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017-18 The psychological landscapes in ‘Gareth Sansom’ marry not only abstraction and figuration but also entirely different visual registers, from photography and stencilling to diagrams, caricatures and writing - the result is a surreal, dazzling cacophony of lyrical effusion. In this impressive suite of thirty-one new paintings, Sansom rallies against his own control and consciousness in his work – he aspires to constantly surprise and challenge himself as an artist.

Sansom’s luridly coloured and densely layered paintings explore physical, psychological and material transformation they begin as one thing but swiftly morph into another. Sansom came to prominence in the 1960s as a radical convention-breaking painter, with influences ranging from Picasso and Jean Dubuffet to Francis Bacon and British pop art.

Eschewing his traditional love of montage, the artist relies on eccentric mark-making and belligerent colouration.

Sansom is one of Australia’s most revered painters, a pre-eminent figure of the Australian avant-garde for over fifty years. Forty years on, Sansom continues to be one of the few truly original voices in contemporary Australian art and has always remained a hardcore iconoclast. Sansom was the inaugural exhibition when Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery first opened in March 1982. Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is thrilled to present new paintings by Gareth Sansom in a special solo exhibition marking the gallery’s 40th anniversary. Sebastian Smee, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic They are large, cacophonous, unstable and sometimes quite terrifying. These are urgent works of art that dare to describe the workings of the mind. His paintings may be beautiful, in a mercurial kind of way, yet beauty is but one of their many strengths.

Something Terrible, Something Lovely by William Sansom