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• Artist
  Gareth Sansom
• Title
  Trans-Trains II
• Date of Production
  2003
• Medium
  digital photograph
• Dimensions
  74 x 122cm
• Credit Details
  private collection, Image courtesy the artist and John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne, © Gareth Sansom, licensed by Viscopy

Gareth Sansom: Alternative Persona

Gareth Sansom's work is like a theatre of the absurd, with a motley cast of manic and macabre characters drawn from the world of the artist's fertile imagination as well as from religion and history, pop culture, street art, underground comics and cinema.

His work, often exploring issues of mortality, sexual identity and popular culture, is noted for raucous colour chords, disjunctions of scale, passages of discordant and lubricious enamel paint, textual commentary and mordant humour.

The latest exhibition examines one of the long-running themes in Sansom's work, the transvestite, having as its centrepiece Samson Agonistes , a major 2007 work which the artist donated to the Art Gallery of Ballarat.

Gareth Sansom has been a major contributor to the art scene since the mid-1960s, with almost 50 individual exhibitions and participation in over 170 group exhibitions to his credit. The work that he has produced in the last decade is more confident and ambitious, more energised and brazen in colour and richer in its iconography than ever before.