Exhibition review: The Outsiders Melbourne

As noted in a recent review, street art is enjoying a surge of artistic recognition and stature in Melbourne. The city and its surrounding suburbs have long been welcoming homes to street artists local and international, with art studios such as Everfresh and Blender becoming hotbeds of underground art, but street art has always skirted around the edges of mainstream culture. That’s part of what it is. 

However, one inner city alley covered in street art, Hosier Lane, is now a thriving tourist attraction. Filled with hundreds of people doing photo shoots and taking selfies, it has become a very popular spot with visitors to the city. Due to its popularity, it’s undoubtedly more artistically policed, yet it still embraces impermanence, the characteristically ephemeral nature of street art. 

Read: Free opportunity to see Australia’s largest Banksy collection and over 100 street artworks

It’s fitting, then, that the corner of Hosier and Flinders Lane is now home to The Outsiders Melbourne, a gallery filled with an accumulated private collection of street art. It’s the collection of Sandra Powell and Andrew King, who fuse their names to form the moniker Sandrew. The pair are very open about their passionate support of street art, and this is just the latest manifestation of that love.

A few things strike the viewer as they peruse these pieces. The first is how the collection – and street art as a whole – uses vibrant, unshackled kaleidoscopes of colour, emotion and scale, often juggling all three at once. Street art is a macro medium in all senses of the word.

Second, street art often juxtaposes polar opposites – good and evil, innocent and dangerous, rare and commonplace – often so sharply that their messages become a stripped back, streamlined sociocultural statement. 

A third observation is that a lot of this art is visualisations of sentiments that are bubbling away on the persistent peripheries of society’s consciousness and/or conscience. 

These three observations lead us directly to the works of UK artist Banksy, arguably the world’s most famous/infamous street artist. This gallery has a whole room dedicated to his work. Love, hate or don’t know him, he pretty well burst onto the global graffiti/street art scene in the 1990s/2000s, and quickly secured a solid reputation by remaining steadfastly and almost mythically anonymous and producing bitingly sharp, often visually simplistic works of sociopolitical satire.

Read: Exhibition review: The Art of Banksy: Without Limits, The District, Docklands

While doing so, he created some of the most distinctive, memorable and reproduced stencil art images in history, some of which are in this exhibition, such as Balloon Girl, Laugh Now and Love is in the Air. His attacks on contemporary politics are inspired (Applause), and his comments on consumerism are simultaneously scathing and hilarious (Shopping Trolley and Sale Ends).

But The Outsiders isn’t just the Banksy show – the main room is filled with masterpieces from some of Australia’s best, most prolific and sometimes most recognisable street artists; for instance, mega-mural maestro Adnate. He’s the guy responsible for, among many others, the 20-storey high mural in Collingwood, Melbourne, which remains one of the biggest in the world. His contribution to this show is Echoes of a Teenage Superstar, a portrait of Silverchair’s Daniel Johns. 

The exhibition has many other highlights, including works by Ha Ha (whose stencil of Ned Kelly was once plastered over Melbourne), Meggs, Kid Zoom, Manda Lane, and a collaboration between Rone and Phibs.

The gallery itself is also a high point, even if some may say that it’s too high class for street art, with its polished marble floor in what looks like an ex-hotel foyer. This style of art going from the open-to-the-elements street to such a luxurious interior space is a curious dichotomy, but it’s a very self-aware one, which makes the duality work. Especially seeing as so many pieces in the exhibition directly employ duality and contrast to get their message across, putting street art in such a plush environment becomes, in itself, another statement – and one that works. 

Read: Exhibition review: Yayoi Kusama, NGV International

Whether or not people ‘get’ this kind of art is beside the point, and this notion is expressed brilliantly by a quote from Banksy, stuck on the gallery’s back wall for all to see and muse over: “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” For this reviewer, that notion encapsulates street art at its best and, with luck, this exhibition will succeed, expand and become a coveted resting place for talent born on the streets, legal or otherwise. 

The Outsiders Melbourne at 167 Flinders Lane will be exhibited until 25 May 2025; free.