1980–present
Anthony Lister
Anthony Lister, from Brisbane, began as a street artist, working on the streets of his home city as a teenager and later in the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. He studied at the Queensland College of Art and after graduating went to New York to work with Max Gimblett. He works in charcoal, acrylic, spray paint and oil, and his work is in the National Gallery of Australia.
Biography
Lister’s first art school was his grandmother. She took him to galleries, taught him to paint, and at home showed him the work of Brett Whitely and Arthur Streeton.
He was born in Brisbane, Australia; his year of birth is given variously as 1979 and 1980, so only the city is stated here. The streets became his ground in his teens: he began painting on them at seventeen. He was one of those who laid the foundations of local street art in Brisbane, and then did the same in the inner suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. It is hard to check who painted there first, and I would not give the word “pioneer” a strict meaning. He received his professional training at the Queensland College of Art and graduated in 2001 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Soon afterwards he went to New York, where his mentor was Max Gimblett, a well-known artist from New Zealand. After that Lister’s work was shown both in galleries and directly on the streets, in Australia and abroad. In 2011 in Sydney he made “Bogan Paradise”, a three-storey exhibition in a disused sex shop. The same year he had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, one of them curated by Roger Gatsman, the other held at the New Image Art gallery. In 2012 he took part in “Unslung Heros” (The Outsiders and Lazarides Gallery) in London and Newcastle. He also showed in other cities: at Urban Spree in Berlin, Robert Fontaine Gallery in Miami, Allouche Gallery in New York, Olsen Gallery in Sydney and Black Art Projects in Melbourne. By 2007 his manner combined street art, expressionism, pop art and contemporary youth culture. He took commercial commissions from Hermès, The Standard Hotel, Westfield, Vogue Australia, Samsung and Mercedes-Benz. Those he is named as having worked with include Blek le Rat, Space Invader, Mark “Chopper” Read and Nick Cave. Lister’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, the BHP Collection, the David Roberts Collection, Brisbane Grammar School, and the corporate collections of the architecture firms Brand & Slater Architects and TVS Partnership.
In 2017 the documentary-maker Eddie Martin made a short film about his career, “Have You Seen the Listers?”.
In 2020 Lister was arrested on charges of offences against several young women, and before trial he was out on conditional bail. In October 2024 a jury found him not guilty on four of the nine charges; it did not reach a verdict on the other five, and a retrial was set for 2025. Until 12 December 2024 his name was withheld by a suppression order, put in place after death threats. In November 2025 Lister was found not guilty on the remaining counts.
Profile notes