When acclaimed Australian artist Fiona Lowry's son became swept up in graffiti culture at age 11, she didn't dismiss it as teenage rebellion. Instead, she observed the rigorous discipline, mentorship, and pedagogy within the community—and it planted the seed for what has become one of Sydney's most provocative exhibitions.
"Searchers: Graffiti + Contemporary Art" is now showing at the National Art School in Darlinghurst, co-curated by Lowry and Katrina Cashman. The exhibition asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when you bring graffiti into a gallery space?
"It's not a show about extracting graffiti from the street and translating it into gallery terms," Lowry explained. "If anything, the exhibition holds a tension between different value systems."
The show features works ranging from household names like Sidney Nolan, Howard Arkley, and Ben Quilty to legendary graffiti writers including TAVEN, SPICE, and MACH—artists whose names most Sydneysiders have glimpsed only on inner-city walls or from train windows. Some works have been created directly on the gallery walls.
"Graffiti doesn't so much 'lose value' in the gallery as shift value," Lowry said. "On the street, it holds power through risk, speed, territory, and peer recognition. In the gallery, different things become visible: form, discipline, lineage."
The exhibition occupies two levels, each offering a distinct experience. The lower level is darker and more intimate—"I wanted it to unfold in sequences, almost like a film," Lowry said. Upstairs shifts into what she describes as "a different register, like an after-image."
Central to all works is the spray can itself—at once an everyday tool and an object so potentially dangerous that Bunnings keeps them locked away. The exhibition explores spray as "a material and a visual language" moving between underground, suburban, cinematic, and contemporary art worlds.
"I think a lot of writers don't have a voice," Lowry reflected. "I think it's making some space for themselves in the world."
Searchers runs until April 11 at the National Art School Gallery.