LOWBROW
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LOWBROW •
Though hardly the first event of the year, the Melbourne Art Fair marks the end of summer, a back to school for the art scene in the city. It’s a key time to take the temperature of the market, see what is in vogue (abstract expressionism always) and out of favour (photography, with two notable exceptions). The Melbourne Art Fair is not lowbrow, though I certainly felt I was wandering through opening night.
Walking down High St, the gnarled hands in the window were my first clue I was in the right place. The second was the canary yellow paste-ups papering the side of the building. At 83 High St in Prahran, an old, abandoned office building has been transformed into an art-filled haven, office-standard concrete and carpet notwithstanding. The hands were simultaneously flipping me off and beckoning me in, and were a great taster for what I would find inside of the fair, which for 2026 is aptly titled “Lust for Life.” There was never a time in the show that any one artist’s practice could have been confused with another. The curation was such that each inclusion was singular, yet the works spoke to each other but never repeated what the other was saying.
Blindside is a mainstay of the Melbourne art scene. We’ve covered it multiple times from the inception of Lowbrow. The gallery found a home in the Nicholas building for years, and has recently bade farewell to the space, with its big windows and temperamental elevators, and moved to 54 Errol Street - a City of Melbourne owned shopfront in North Melbourne. The new space is long and narrow; it clearly had a former life as a family home attached to a shopfront. It's a space that calls for creativity in exhibition design in order to make full use of the long hallways and somewhat incongruous spaces. Chokehold was the inaugural exhibition: a one day photographic show, with a panel discussion and, of course, a peep show in the new back garden. This show is also a return and a goodbye for Sherburn - part of the Blindside team for many years, who stepped away at the end of last year. In their own words: “I’m very confident in how this is really the much needed future step for such a significant, heritage form of an artist-run space.”
I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never been to Off The Kerb before. The pay to play gallery model that Off the Kerb and other galleries like it use (PG Printmaker, fortyfivedownstairs, Brunswick Street Gallery, SOL) has perplexed me since I was in art school; not quite a commercial gallery, not quite an ARI, but a secret third thing that hovers between the two. Yet, they do hold an important place in the community for those ready to exhibit their work, but not in the stable of a commercial gallery. Their current exhibition, Summer Daze, is under the umbrella of Midsumma festival - Melbourne’s LQBTQIA+ arts and culture festival that plays out across the city through January and February.
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George Paton Gallery is currently hosting two solo shows; Translucences by Soyo Paek and Purity and Danger by Leena O’Luu. The gallery, situated in the University of Melbourne’s Arts and Culture building at the Parkville campus, is run by the university’s student union (UMSU). Work is chosen via a proposals process and only current Uni Melb students can apply. George Paton gallery fills a strange niche at the university, in that it doesn’t feel like a student gallery, and that it’s so separate from UniMelb’s Southbank VCA campus - which is where all of the creative arts students are situated. George Paton feels more aligned with the professional side of the university, rather than the student side, even though it’s definitely student work on display.