Gareth Sansom (born 19 November 1939) is an Australian artist, painter, printmaker and collagist and winner of the 2008 John McCaughey Memorial Prize of $100,000.

Sansom has had a distinct influence on subsequent Australian art, paving the way for later notable artists such as Juan Davila and Howard Arkley.

In particular Sansom developed a series of photographs in which he portrayed Hollywood film noir icons such as Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford.

Two series of works on cardboard using these photographs as collaged items within graphic media and paint were shown at Warehouse Gallery, Melbourne, in 1975 and 1977.

In 1978, RMIT Gallery presented a major survey of Sansom's paintings and graphic works covering the period 1964–1978.

Back in Australia these watercolors were exhibited at Roslyn Oxley9Gallery in 1990 ('Out of India'), and at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne in 1991.

[2] Sansom (now in his eighties) has recently returned to earlier themes in his paintings by inserting digital photographs of himself in various disguises using latex horror masks and realistic female masks, as well as incorporating latex prosthetics of female body parts; his aim being to create an uneasy tension between the literalness of the photographs and the painterliness within the paintings, which can veer wildly between abstraction and figuration.

Also in 2016, Sansom was included in Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday, held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney.

In 2016 Sansom was interviewed in a digital story and oral history for the State Library of Queensland's James C Sourris AM Collection.

The show was opened by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, Sebastian Smee, whose essay about the show stated that Sansom had a lack of sentimentality about "our darker natures; for the parts of us that idle along during the day, purring harmlessly beneath the surface of our charming, careful, mildly-anxious social selves, but that intermittently growl, bark or stare inappropriately; that come out at night, and are liable to erupt in spasms of desire, violence and teeth-baring, and are tempted by self-annihilation.

[5] Art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, John McDonald, wrote of the exhibition's: "sheer, crazed abundance.

[6] In 2019, Sansom was included in the exhibition, Ways of Seeing: recent acquisitions from the collection, staged at the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.