Anthony Lister (BNE)

A trendsetter with an international following and a general disregard for borders, prolific  street artist and painter Anthony Lister has managed to marry the empathy and abjection of 20th Century figuration with the irreverence of the street. His work shows a genuine affection for the human body, and also a tender understanding of the ways in which the demented, destructive, playful and powerful collide and coalesce.

Lister was born and raised in Brisbane, a metropolitan center and capital of Queensland, Australia. In 2001, he earned his Bachelor in Fine Arts at Queensland College of Art, and in 2003, moved to New York to continue his education under the tutelage of distinguished abstract painter and New Zealand native Max Gimblett.

It was in New York that Lister first found a visual language all his own. In 2006, he shifted his focus from painting more amorphous caricatures and figures to painting superheroes. The shift gave his work newfound forcefulness. He retained his distinctive approach to mark-making, but began appropriating and re-imagining comic muses, relatable characters that act as classical mythology’s pop equivalents. These characters have become proxies for Lister, allowing him to react to the world as he sees it and pursue tongue-in-cheek philosophical explorations—explorations that raise more questions than they answer.

Lister’s superheroes are never indomitable conquerors or unequivocal villains. Instead, they’re contradictory—sometimes skeletal faces top buff, patriotic bodies or fangs pop out of otherwise gallant-looking characters—and often carnivalesque, due to Lister’s pop-infused palette and adventurous take on expressionism. The loose brushwork and deceptive feeling of spontaneity, a feeling Lister pushes even further in his street work, feed off the legacies of painters like Francis Bacon and Egon Schiele, whose boldly distorted figures often languish in isolation. But while Lister’s work certainly indulges in distortion, it pokes fun at the overly emotive qualities of much expressionistic painting too. With its sometimes startling comedic exaggerations, the work both understands the intensity of human feeling and undermines a world that takes itself too seriously.

In fact, while Lister acknowledges icons like Rodin, Picasso, and the Chapman brothers as influences, he cites the far less self-important drawings of his son and daughter as the most enlightening inspirations of all. His children appeared in the “Meet the Listers” sticker campaign, a project that helped establish him as Brisbane’s pioneering street artist and cleverly complimented the large spray-painted murals he was making on sides of building and billboards.

Now in between New York and Brisbane, Lister continues to work both on the street and in the studio. In 2010, he was featured in solo exhibitions in Miami, Sydney, New York, Toronto and Melbourne. Macmillan Art Publishing released his self-titled monograph, and he also appeared in Beyond The Street: The 100 Leading Figures in Urban Art (Gestalten), Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Art (Taschen), and Stickers: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art (Rizzoli).