Gareth Sansom

Ten Years of Contemporary Art: The James C Sourris AM Collection | 12 November 2011 — 19 February 2012 | GOMA | Free admission

Gareth Sansom’s practice treads a fine line between abstraction and figuration. Despite his avowed boredom with the ‘The Field’ generation of hard-edge painters, Samson’s works use indeterminate fields of colour, shape and associative effects. They are infused with brashness and blokeishness but also tuned to philosophical debates and subtle identity politics.

This grand triptych was the finale work of the artist’s 2005 survey at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne. In TS Eliot’s 1932 play of the same name, the character of Sweeney represents the unrefined, sensual, secular modern man, who summarises life as:

Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.

In the catalogue for the Potter show, Sansom described making the painting as a two-month or longer process of ‘cancelling out, bringing back. If the thing becomes too absurdly obvious then it has to be knocked back.’