Anthony Lister's The Beautiful Misery, Sydney, 2013

In the winter of 2013 the Brisbane-born painter Anthony Lister showed a solo exhibition called The Beautiful Misery at a commercial gallery in Sydney. It closed on 25 August that year. The show is a useful marker for anyone interested in how street painting found its way onto gallery walls in Australia in the early 2010s, because it gathered most of what Lister was doing at the time into one room: big canvases, small ones, backlit stencils and a bronze. This note is about that exhibition and that period of his work, and about how to look at painting that started life on a wall outside.

What the show contained

The most detailed public record of the show is a short review by Sharne Wolff, published on the Sydney art site The Art Life on 9 August 2013. From it, and from the image the review reproduced, we can piece together a fair picture.

The subjects were held together loosely by the contradiction in the title, the idea that suffering and pleasure sit very close together. Wolff listed human figures dressed in floral garlands, smiling skulls, swords decorated with candles, a Jesus wearing a crown of roses, the poisonous flowering plant datura, and a painting of Kings Cross. The superheroes that had been a familiar part of Lister's imagery were, by her account, absent from this group of work. What remained recognisably his were the sweeping black outlines, the exaggerated body parts and a habit of saying a lot with very little: a swipe of blue for eyes, a dash of red for lips.

The title work, The Beautiful Misery (2013), was a large canvas, 190 by 186 centimetres, listed in ink, charcoal, spray paint, acrylic and oil. That list of materials says a great deal about the period. Spray paint sat underneath the acrylic and oil, which gave the surface the loose look of something done freehand, while the details were tightly controlled.

Alongside the paintings were black and white light-box stencils, images cut from a dark surface and lit from behind, and a limited edition bronze called Dancer. Wolff noted that the range of formats showed his versatility. A separate online report from the time described the show as hung like one installation, with larger works and smaller clusters on the walls and the light boxes given their own space.

Where the work came from

Lister was born in Brisbane in 1979 and, as a teenager, was one of the people who started a street art scene in that city, later painting in the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne as well. He graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 2001 and, the following year, went to New York to work with the New Zealand-born painter Max Gimblett. By 2010 he was painting walls in Brooklyn, where the street art blog Brooklyn Street Art photographed him at work on a large face.

His materials across this time were charcoal, acrylic, spray paint and oil, and his sources were the usual ones for painters who grew up with street culture: expressionism, pop art and the visual noise of youth culture. In early 2012 a show of his in Los Angeles centred on the ballerina, with figures drawn from sketching a live model, and the dancer turns up again in the Sydney bronze a year later.

Wolff's review records one more thing worth holding onto. For Lister, she wrote, the street supplied the fun and the adrenalin, but he regarded his studio practice as the real thing. That is the key to The Beautiful Misery. It was not street art moved indoors. It was gallery painting made by someone whose hand had been trained on walls.

How to look at painting that comes from the street

Paintings like these are easy to misread in a white room. People either treat them as a souvenir of something cooler that happened outside, or they judge them only against older studio painting and find them rough. Both miss what is going on. Here is a short routine I find helpful with any large canvas that mixes spray paint with brushwork.

A ten-minute looking exercise

Take a canvas of about two metres square, roughly the size of the title work in this show.

1. From four metres back, spend two minutes on the drawing alone. Follow the main black outline with your eye from one end to the other. Notice where it thickens, where it breaks, where it overshoots. On a wall that line would have been made fast, in one go, at arm's length. Ask whether it still has that speed on canvas.
2. Walk in to arm's length and spend three minutes on the layers. Spray paint leaves a soft, slightly fuzzy edge and a fine spatter; brushed acrylic and oil sit on top with a firmer edge. Try to work out which went down first. With this kind of painting the order of layers is often the story of the picture.
3. Step back to two metres and spend three minutes on the face, if there is one. Count how many marks make the expression. In Lister's case the answer was often very few, and the economy is part of the skill.
4. Finish with two minutes on the room. Look at how the canvas sits next to its neighbours. Shows by painters from street practice are often hung in clusters or across a wall, closer to how images build up in a laneway than in a neat line.

Three questions for the gallery desk

If you go to see work by a painter with a street background, a few plain questions help. Is this a unique painting or an edition? A light-box stencil, a print or a bronze cast may exist in several versions, and the gallery should tell you how many and how each is numbered. What are the materials? Spray paint, acrylic and oil age differently, and it is reasonable to ask what the surface is and how it should be cared for. Was this made for this show? Many painters make a body of work for a particular exhibition, and knowing that can help you see the pieces as a group rather than as separate objects. The first works room on this site goes through editions and certificates in more detail.

Why the show is worth remembering

The early 2010s were a period when a number of Australian painters who had begun outside were showing regularly in commercial galleries and being taken seriously as painters. The Beautiful Misery is a well-documented example of that shift from one artist: a show with a clear idea in its title, a mix of formats, and paintings that kept the speed and economy of the street while being built up slowly in the studio. Not much more than that was recorded in public, and it is better to leave the gaps than to fill them in.

If you want to see work of this kind for yourself, the guide to visiting Sydney gallery shows covers how the exhibition calendar works and how to walk into a commercial gallery with confidence. For notes on other painters, start at the painters page.