Hancock has been progressively pushing the street art and painting boundaries in the last few years, and his latest work is representative of that.

The collection is presented by Dirty Playground – the curating, party making and art showing collective headed by Mike Barker. It opened last night at GoGo Bar (under Chin Chin off Flinders lane) which means you can get a banging whisky or cocktail whilst you look at a bad-arse portrait of Frank Zappa.

Anybody with half an interest in graffiti would recognise Hancock’s dark and surreal street art around Melbourne. This time though he has been putting paint on paper, canvas and wood to allow a small peek into the personal work behind the street art.

The work is still dark, and sometimes somber, and of course it is all laid down on the canvas damn well. It is priced exceptionally reasonably, as Hancock wanted it to be accessible to everybody, not just rich art appreciators, and not surprisingly it was selling fast at the opening.

We saw Hancock destroy everybody at Secret Walls last year and his recent works have been well received. I have no doubt his rise in the art scene will continue.

I spent a day with Hancock recently to see how he puts together one of the bigger works: roaming the city to find inspiration, mashing these images into collages and starting again before putting some paint down. To see the final product you’ll have to get down to GoGo Bar.

Hancock will be open for a few weeks yet, but I would get down there quick as it almost sold out last night.

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Max Fin is a third-year Bachelor of Journalism student and the Photo Editor for upstart magazine. Follow him on Tumblr.

Photos – Max Fin