With great excitement, we gear up for another fantastic year with Wall to Wall Festival. Located in the small rural town of Benalla, being Australia’s largest Street Art Festival, prepare to see some huge talent. With the likes of Major artistic giants such as Smug (UK), Adnate, Bronte Naylor and Filthy Ratbag, you can guarantee it will be a huge weekend full of live painting, workshops, bench talks and good times.
Benalla, Victoria, Australia
April 3rd – 5th, 2020.
photos by Nicole Reed.
Nestled in the bustling hub of Melbourne CBD, talented French street artist JAW created magic within the 367 Collins Street building. Through incorporating iconic imagery with bold colour abstraction and hyperrealism JAW paints a collaged landscape that any Melbournian can relate to- from Flinders Street Station to the iron lace on Victorian houses and bike lanes with bicycles.
Stretched along 40 metres of the newly refurbished building, JAW’s impeccable creativity shines through, as his clever choice of colour and attention to detail bridge the lines between street art and fine art. Never failing to capture a nostalgic feeling and the character of this city.
Photography by Nicole Reed.
This January, we welcome the 2020 Lunar New Year, welcoming the year of the Rat. To kick things off, artist Kitt Bennett playfully brings to life the Kirin Soundbar in partnership with Crown. Located along the banks of the Yarra River, the soundbar is a centrepiece of the Lunar New Year Festival, with DJs and live noodle-pulling performances, Kitt captures this joyous time of year with imagery of dragons, lanterns, Tommy the Noodle Man, and lucky colours of red and gold. We here at Juddy Roller with you a great and prosperous new year!
Melbourne-based artist Kitt Bennett paints large (very large) illustrative murals on an unconventional surface: the ground.
His most recent adventure combined his art with aerial photography to craft the world’s most massive independently created piece of “Gif-iti”. The work, crafted by Bennett alongside collective Juddy Roller, features 10 human figures that craft a “perpetually tumbling” scene when viewed in sequence.
Inhabiting a colossal 9000 sqm of disused waterfront ground space at Port Melbourne’s Fisherman’s Wharf precinct, the project took Bennett 30 days to complete; using 700 litres of paint to compose the work which comprises a series of 10 individual 30-metre-long figures.
The size and form of this mural is unprecedented – four times the size of the previous holder of the title, (which clocks in at 27 storeys high) this mural has taken over the equivalent of 90 floors-worth of ground space.
Painted using only Taubmans acrylic and Monarch Painting rollers and brushes, and made possible thanks to the kind people at Independent Cement and Lime.
Thanks as always to Common State media.
Kicking off the 2019 basketball season earlier this year, Sofles brings to life the spirit of Melbourne basketball through an 18m tall wall mural sitting alongside a custom decorated 3×3 basketball court and hoop. Through Sofles aerosol artistry he depicts basketball legends Andrew Gaze, Liz Cambage, Lauren Jackson, Andrew Bogut, and Ben Simmons donned in their green and yellow colours of the Boomers and the Opals.
The team at Juddy Roller teamed up with Visit Victoria to help create an interactive artwork, as the court is open to the public at the Marvel Stadium in the Docklands, so come shoot some hoops and get into the spirit of Australian basketball!
George rose continues on with her successful 2017 as she teams up with Juddy Roller and the crew at Fed Square to produce a large typography based mural as part of Fed Square’s 2017/2018 Summer campaign titled ‘So Hot Right Now’.
The campaign is just the start of a larger on-going project as Fed Square is completing renovation work on the square, hoping to give the public something much nicer to look at while all the noise is going on. The brief for the mural was big and bright, so naturally, George Rose was an easy candidate for the job.
The mural is unfortunately only temporary, so will only be hanging around until early 2018, so be sure to not miss this one before it’s gone for good.
Thanks again to Taubmans for their ongoing support! And thank you to Nicole Reed for the pics!
Juddy Roller’s second biennial Heist Exhibition has returned with an impressive international collection, showcasing a dynamic range of world-leading contemporary artists at the Juddy Roller Gallery. The line up consists of artists from six different countries, with names such as Adnate, Smug, Jaw, Sofles, Lister, and Cope2 all in attendance.
This has been one of our most exciting international collections we have had the pleasure of curating, with much credit due to our newly appointed gallery manager Dominika Kuthova. The gallery’s opening night welcomed over 400 guests through the doors, all who helped make the evening a memorable experience.
The Juddy Roller Gallery is currently open to the public from Tuesday until Saturday from 10 am to 4 pm and the exhibition will run through until the 29th of November. The gallery is conveniently located at 226a Johnson St, Fitzroy, in one of Melbourne’s most colourful laneways.
We also want to give thanks to our generous sponsors, Grolsch and Maker & Monger for their ongoing support.
Sydney-based illustrator Brad Eastman, or better known by his street name ‘Beastman’, is a multidisciplinary artist from Sydney, Australia. His instantly recognisable style of illustration on his murals, artworks, and designs have brought him international acclaim which is slingshotting him through a super successful and prolific career.
This alias Beastman is not only a clever play on words from his real name, but also provides a suitable description of his strong illustration style. Influenced by the biodiversity, symbolism and design aesthetics behind nature’s repetitive geometric growth patterns and organic landscapes, Beastman’s paintings, digital illustration, commercial projects and public murals explore a unique visual language, depicting future environments of abstracted landscapes, potential new life forms and human intervention
Kaff-eine is an established Australian street and contemporary artist who has gained a strong following for her engaging illustrative freehand style, delicate linework, and quiet melancholic characters. She has painted public and private works in Australia, Germany, France, USA and the Philippines with a handful of successful solo and group exhibitions as well as having her hand in illustrating two children’s books.
In addition to her solo and independent projects, Kaff-eine recently co-founded ‘Cheeseagle‘, a creative collective who make art projects designed for exhibition and social impact which is making big moves nationally and internationally.
Kaff has just spent the past two months in Silo Country (Aka – Rosebery) where she has been working on one of her largest canvases to date, adding a sixth silo to the Silo Art Trail. We managed to sneak in a few words with her while she was on site, to capture a glimpse into her latest project. Kaff has since completed the over-sized mural, and has been able to share some photos of the magic.
Image by Silke Lapina
This fortnight in the studio, we are incredibly stoked to be able to sit down with our international pal Nychos and catch up on his extremely busy life. For those that don’t yet know, Nychos has been making waves all over the world, expanding from his original studio in Vienna and onto the world circuit. San Francisco is now his new home (when he’s not travelling the world), where he has spent a little more than the past year living and breathing all forms of art and illustration, continuing on with his busy life.
Raised in a traditional Austrian hunting family, death and dissection were the daily business for Nychos. Blending morbid and dark themes with the colourful, hyper-loony aesthetics influenced by pop-culture and cartoons, Nychos has developed a unique style that he performs with powerhouse effect whether on the street or in the gallery.
Nychos often collaborates with the world’s most accomplished painters, making him one of the most noticeable breakout artists from the Austrian scene. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited in galleries worldwide, including ten solo exhibitions, one which we were lucky enough to host at the Juddy Roller Gallery earlier this year, as well as a four-story “Dissection of a Kangaroo” mural located in Collingwood, Melbourne.