'AUSTRALIA'S BANKSY' ANTHONY LISTER TO EXHIBIT ‘CIRCLE OF LIFE’ IN SYDNEY FROM TUESDAY 12 MAY 2026
Announcement posted by Markson Sparks! 04 May 2026
"Print didn't die - people just stopped paying attention."
Anthony Lister, modern art disruptor, street and adventure artist, will make a long-awaited return next week for a new exhibition entitled 'Circus of Life' in Sydney from Tuesday 12 May until Sunday 17 May 2026, with an exclusive VIP event to occur at 6pm Wednesday 13 May.
One of Australia's most heralded inner city street artists, Lister has made a mark globally, exhibiting in the artistic Mecca's of the world: New York, Japan, London.
Says Lister, "This isn't just an art exhibition - it's a return from exile. After watching the physical world get swallowed by screens, exhibiting again feels like reclaiming territory."
"It's about putting something real, tactile, and undeniable back into a culture that's become increasingly intangible. This show is less a comeback and more a correction."
The theme of the exhibition is media, vanity, and collapse.
"I've placed myself on the covers of magazines - not as a celebration, but as a disruption. It's me inserting myself into a system that manufactures identity and calling out its absurdity from within," he said.
"Where I am now as an artist is somewhere between reflection and resistance. I'm not chasing relevance - I'm interrogating it. This work sits in that tension: between ego and critique, visibility and distortion, beauty, and something far less comfortable."
For Lister, each piece that will feature in 'Circus of Life' had to hold tension.
"If it was too comfortable, it didn't make the cut. If it didn't challenge the viewer - or me - it wasn't strong enough," he said.
"Together, the works operate like a magazine that's slightly unhinged - familiar on the surface, but fractured underneath."
The exhibition will offer collectors a rare opportunity to acquire a limited selection of some of Lister's works.
'Circus of Life' will run from 12-17 May from 10am to 8pm with an exclusive VIP event to occur at 6pm on 13 May 2026 by invitation only.
To RSVP, contact Marta Wiacek on 0409 291 785 or marta@marksonsparks.com, or Max Markson on 0412 501 601 or max@marksonsparks.com.
*Image: 'Here I present myself as the focal point, the feature article and in some cases the celebrity. By positioning my image as the model, I poke a candid and satirical focus at the absurdity of vanity, popular culture and the deformed nature of media in general. This body of work explores the contradictions of beauty through juxtaposing the aura of beauty and popularity against the ridiculous optics of a disabled middle-aged mostly white male' - Anthony Lister.
ABOUT 'CIRCUS OF LIFE' - AN OVERVIEW BY ANTHONY LISTER
I love to touch things. I am a tactile person you could say. Not necessarily materialistic, let's just say I miss printed media like magazines, comics, and books in general. Some of my fondest memories are from being in libraries and especially secondhand bookstores as a child. I love discovering new information. I love the smell of old ink. It fills me with sadness to have been witness to so many of my favourite second hand bookstores go out of business. Books are precious objects to me. To think that they have almost become redundant due to the developments of technology would have made anybody from the past twenty centuries laugh in disbelief. Reading, writing and even turning pages has become replaced with robot voices, copy/pasting and the incessant scrolling.
In the same way that the adventure of getting somewhere was lost as we grew older and replaced the adventure of the journey with the convenience of automotive transportation, so too, have we lost the thrill in seeking out new information. There is a different kind of satisfaction that accompanies the tactile seeking of such, thus reducing research to an effortless task conducted on behalf of a robot and via search engine engines.
These pieces mark a return to the celebration of Printed matter. They too mark a pivotal point in my personal journey as I too have returned to the art world. My works have graced the covers of many books, magazines, newspapers, catalogues and flyers for over three decades. Here I have taken the liberty to present a series of self portraits, positioning myself upon the covers of popular magazines, some of the fortunate magazines which have afforded to survive the digital genocide which has forced so many less fortunate publications to die in the wake of the technological revolution.
As a child I would get so excited to see posters advertising that a Circus or a Fair was coming to town, I would nag and nag my mother to let my brothers and I attend. If not just for the show bags, then for the rides and battered sausages. Fireworks were amazing to watch with fairy floss in hand. To this day the smell of fresh explosives takes me straight back to those exact moments of awe.
Life is like a rollercoaster the way it throws one about turbulently through tunnels of emotion both high and low. At times life can feel like a kind of manic Circus full of horrifying twists, haunted house surprises, weird looks from strangers and strange looking weirdos, some funny and some terrifying.