![\"Nick](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/f207d0dd9bda53907cf3dfc4d5d166f2ee7ed4a7796b49392ed58fd96f605844.png\")
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January 24, 2026 \u2014 5:30am<\/p>\n
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Remove items from your saved list<\/a> to add more.<\/p>\n Save this article for later<\/p>\n Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime.<\/p>\n Got it<\/p>\n AAA<\/p>\n In a popular YouTube video<\/a> from a couple of years ago, a well-known Sydney graffiti writer who goes by \u201cTAVEN\u201d films himself wandering around the Art Gallery of NSW.<\/p>\n As he appraises some of the work (\u201cI love coming here,\u201d he says), he asks an attendant whether there is a graffiti section he could look at.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not sure but if you want to check with the information desk \u2026\u201d is the response.<\/p>\n After receiving several more similar answers to his polite inquiries, he leaves the 150-year-old museum and wanders out into the Domain to a nearby wall long a favourite among local graffiti writers. The camera pans past 60 or more \u201cburners\u201d \u2013 top quality, vivid pieces created by the best writers \u2013 along the 200-metre wall.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not inside \u2013 they actually put it outside,\u201d says TAVEN with deadpan irony.<\/p>\n The unmistakable message here: street art has no legitimate place in a \u201cproper\u201d gallery. It should be excluded from official, sanctified spaces and relegated to the street.<\/p>\n But what happens if you bring graffiti into a gallery space? This question \u2013 among many \u2013 has captured Fiona Lowry, who, along with co-curator Katrina Cashman, has put together a new exhibition at Darlinghurst\u2019s National Art School. Searchers: Graffiti + Contemporary Art is described as \u201can exhibition about the politics and poetics of spray\u201d.<\/p>\n Works included range from household names including Sidney Nolan, Howard Arkley and Ben Quilty to graffiti writers such as TAVEN, SPICE and MACH, all legends in street art circles but whose names most of us might have glimpsed only on an inner-city wall or perhaps from the window of a moving train. Some of the works have been created directly on the gallery walls.<\/p>\n For Lowry, the exhibition is not about conferring \u201clegitimacy\u201d on street art by hanging it in a conventional gallery.<\/p>\n \u201c[It\u2019s] not a show about extracting graffiti from the street and translating it into gallery terms. If anything, the exhibition holds a tension between different value systems,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cGraffiti doesn\u2019t so much \u2018lose value\u2019 in the gallery as shift value. On the street, it holds power through risk, speed, territory and peer recognition. In the gallery, different things become visible: form, discipline, lineage and the deep relationship to authorship and mark-making. Part of what the exhibition tries to do is hold those two value systems in tension rather than pretend one replaces the other.\u201d<\/p>\n The seed for the show was sown when Lowry\u2019s own son, then aged about 11, became swept up in the graffiti world.<\/p>\n Related Article \u201cWhat I discovered by watching him was that he had this really intense experience with it where he was constantly refining his word and the form of it and connecting with other writers online and watching films,\u201d says Lowry.<\/p>\n She also recognised that within graffiti culture, there was an organised pedagogy in which experienced writers mentored up-and-comers.<\/p>\n \u201cThe older writers will often do sketches for the younger writers,\u201d says Lowry. \u201cIt\u2019s almost a way of continuing their own style into that next generation. It\u2019s a very unofficial kind of art school.\u201d<\/p>\n Searchers occupies two levels of the National Art School Gallery, and each space is intended to present a different experience for the viewer.<\/p>\n Lowry describes the lower level, which is darker and more intimate, as a \u201ccharged space\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted it to unfold in sequences, almost like a film,\u201d she says. \u201cUpstairs shifts into a different register, like an after-image. It becomes lighter, more optical and painterly \u2013 spray as drift, spray as breath \u2013 and it changes how the downstairs lingers in your body.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the central threads running through all the works is the spray can, which gave birth to contemporary graffiti culture in the 1970s. Spray cans are at once unremarkable, everyday tools and objects so dangerous that in your local Bunnings, they are locked away in cages.<\/p>\n In contrast to the brush, mark-making with a spray can largely removes the trace of the hand because the artist is not physically touching the surface. Skilled writers can also produce hard and soft edges by manipulating factors such as the distance from the wall.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s also something very immediate and satisfying about it because it\u2019s this air with paint particles that allows you to make a sweeping gesture quickly,\u201d says Lowry.<\/p>\n![\"Fiona](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/465b8c7560a52d0187db738a1ed0e47266979427.jpeg\")
Fiona Lowry wanted to know what happened when graffiti was brought in from the street. Wolter Peeters<\/p>\n![\"Work](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/569f1afaa9c28e6ddfcfcef87a4ce2222c29e152.jpeg\")
Work by graffiti writer MACH. <\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/555d89546ff1ddbe6ff3d79a253bb08e042665ed.jpeg\")
A detail from an untitled 1987 Sidney Nolan spray can work from his Remembrances of My Youth series. Photo by Rob Little<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/604ffae83315ad437dd6b0037597cf3a461c7d80.jpeg\")
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