In an upstairs gallery, in a factory building in the Melbourne suburb of Collingwood that you could easily walk past if you didn’t know it was there, currently lies Mike Makatron’s Nature of Nature, an exhibition that proves it’s not just the National Gallery of Victoria that deserves rave reviews.Â
Makatron is predominantly a mural painter, with his works adorning walls and buildings in Australia and the US. He’s had exhibitions in both those countries, as well as Brazil and Japan.
Perhaps it should be noted here that tagging, graffiti, street art and murals are all very different things, and they should not be written off as not ‘real art’, which many people seem to do. Thankfully, street art has been gaining artistic credibility through galleries such as Fitzroy’s B-SIDE gallery, which features the work of many street artists, and last year silo art in rural areas adorned the pages of Australian Geographic.
Not only that, but Blender Studios, which has nurtured many prolific street artists and mural painters such as Hayden Dewar and Matt Hannah, recently won Melbourne’s 2024 Arts and Events Award for being “instrumental in shaping [Melbourne’s] urban art scene”. Melbourne has long been active in street art, attracting international talent like Keith Haring, Lauren YS and, according to legend, Banksy. Chances are you’ve seen art by Loretta Lizzio, Matt Andate and Creature Creature while wandering around the CBD and neighbouring suburbs. So like it or not, understand it or not, want to buy it or not, street art is part of Melbourne culture, and is gaining artistic recognition in many circles.
Makatron’s current exhibition is another celebration of this. The first of the two-room show is dominated by a large silver tree adorned with aluminium monstera leaves, and a diptych of two snails, Snail Cacti Garden and Snail Succulent Garden, each with the front of their shells being windows that look into a garden world within the snail.
Both paintings are luscious in their imagination, scale, texture and rendering of colours. Makatron’s bio states that he depicts a world where nature fights back, “reclaiming the earth from the uncaring advance of civilisation”. HIs love of nature is evident, with bees, ladybirds, platypuses and garden-munching gastropods as his subjects, and he uses a variety of mediums, including pine, ceramic, bones and metal.
His work sometimes subtly combines animal and human; for instance, his paintings Blue Eyed Bee and Green Eyed Bee, which can be seen online in the catalogue, with bees with surfaces like their hives, and what looks like an industrial vent under the wing. Showing bees to look slightly mechanical in this way reminds this reviewer that most of humanity’s designs and inventions throughout history have been adapted from nature.
The second room’s centrepiece is a nest made of what looks like latticed plywood, with a single large egg surrounded by skulls, possibly belonging to sheep. This work, along with the backdrop of a painting of a river glowing purple and two purple, real-sized platypuses swimming on the wall nearby, and the neighbouring painting of three oversized Tasmanian devils around the carcass of a long-abandoned, rusting 1950s Ford pick-up truck combine to incite thought-provoking conversation.
Some of Makatron’s works are reminiscent of Alan Weisman’s 2007 book The World Without Us, and the TV series Life After People, which came shortly after, both of which explored the idea of what would happen if humans simply disappeared. While that book was criticised by some as being “extremist views of the Greens“, it was nonetheless a fascinating thought experiment.
Similarly, a look into Makatron’s world invites the viewer to ponder nature, all the animals within it including us, and the relationships between them as humans consume their way through the Anthropocene. Most wonderfully, though, Makatron lets us contemplate these ideas while looking at some gorgeously accomplished artworks. He seldom does gallery shows, so see this while you can.
Mike Makatron: Nature of Nature will be exhibited a Backwoods Gallery until 8 December 2024.
