Gareth Sansom: It's Now or Never

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery is delighted to present new paintings by Gareth Sansom in ‘It’s Now or Never’, his first solo exhibition with the gallery following his major survey show at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne in 2017-18.

This exhibition coincides with Caroline Rothwell’s exhibition ‘Splice’.

“If you don’t know the work of Australia’s Gareth Sansom you are missing out on a painter working at full throttle – one of the most exciting painters anywhere in the world at present.” – Sebastian Smee, Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic for the Washington Post

Sansom is one of Australia’s most revered painters, a pre-eminent figure of the Australian avant-garde for over 50 years. Nearing 80 years of age has not slowed down his vigour as a painter. Sansom is lobbing painterly grenades at mortality, religion, sexuality, abstraction, figuration, cubism, vorticism and cultural history with an energy that throws hazardous sparks from the surface of the canvas, setting alight the immediate surroundings and sending viewers, collectors and critics alike into spinning reactions of delight, revolt, confusion and sheer admiration.

‘It’s Now or Never’ captures this energy in abundance. It comes close on the heels of his major National Gallery of Victoria retrospective ‘Gareth Sansom: Transformer’ which presented 130 works and spanned seven gallery spaces. ‘It’s Now or Never’ continues Sansom’s explorations of life and mortality, with renewed vitality and passion – an exhibition of a creative force ‘at full throttle.'”