Michael Porter is perhaps the best recognised, though most elusive and enigmatic artist to emerge from the Melbourne street art scene over the last 5 years. His obsessive, emotionally charged heads and figures can be seen all over Melbourne on walls, train lines and subterranean tunnels. Highly original and idiosyncratic, Michael’s street paintings distinguish themselves from popular styles both in subject and technique, deriving neither from graffiti writing nor the graphic-driven stencil movement. Michael has pioneered the use of paint rollers and extension poles to create highly detailed public works that are both deeply personal and universal.
Reductivistic in his approach, Michael has said that he looks for the image of the face in the chaos rather than making it. Lusty, anguished, grimacing, laughing, critical, malevolent, impish – Michael Porter’s heads and figures often feature both male and female characteristics, expressing ambiguous states of human nature and frailty that defy simplistic reading but are instinctively understood. Morality is not straight-forward, carnality is easily descended into. We are vulnerable to dark tendencies.
Alongside his prolific legacy of street painting, for the last three years Michael has worked with increasingly ambitious bronze alongside his passion for found materials. Michael has previously shown at Until Never as part of the Trouble With Boys exhibition in 2007, and his first solo show brings together paintings, bronze, ceramics, wood, and paper works.
Gallery hours : Wednesday to Saturday 12-6pm
2nd Floor 3-5 Hosier Lane (Enter from Rutledge Lane) Melbourne AUSTRALIA
