ALL GOOD THINGS: Very Nearly Almost closes with a show at StolenSpace

In April 2017 the people behind Very Nearly Almost, the UK street-art quarterly, announced that the magazine was finishing. It had run for ten years, since 2006, and reached 35 issues, and the decision to stop was theirs, made while the magazine was still doing well. There was no slow fade. The ending was planned as a proper send-off, with an exhibition and a book to follow.

Over that decade the covers had carried some of the biggest names that street art and the wider urban scene produced: D*Face, Invader, Shepard Fairey, Futura, Swoon and the photographer Martha Cooper among them. The closing show was built in the same spirit.

The show

ALL GOOD THINGS was the magazine’s tenth anniversary group exhibition, a selection of more than fifty artists chosen from those the team had most enjoyed featuring. It hung at StolenSpace, the gallery D*Face runs on Osborn Street at the bottom of Brick Lane and one of the longest-standing homes for this kind of work in East London. It opened on the evening of Thursday 27 April and stayed up until 30 April.

The walls held original works, artist’s proofs and hand-finished prints from a roll call of international names, alongside a group of newer painters the magazine had picked out as ones to watch. The list gives a fair picture of what the magazine had covered: Vhils and Aryz, Faile and Herakut, Invader and Shepard Fairey, Conor Harrington and James Jean, C215 and Blek le Rat, Mariusz Waras of M-City, Eine, Tizer and Mobstr, The London Police, Kid Acne, Rone, Fintan Magee, Cyrcle, Chloe Early and Will Barras, with dozens more beside them.

For Macmillan

Every piece in the exhibition was offered in an online auction on artFido, with bidding running from midday on the opening Thursday until midnight on the Sunday, and every penny raised went to Macmillan Cancer Support. For a magazine that had spent a decade in the company of artists whose editions and canvases were fought over by collectors, it was a generous way to end: the last thing it did with that community’s work was give the proceeds away.

The opening night had the usual trimmings of a Very Nearly Almost party: rum cocktails, pitta chips and free tacos served from a truck that Insa had painted.

The auction was also a neat reflection of what the magazine had been. It started in 2006 as an independent quarterly out of the UK, covering street art alongside illustration, urban art and photography, at a time when most of the artists on the StolenSpace walls were still better known on the street than in galleries. By the last issue several of them were selling at Sotheby’s and Bonhams. The fifty-odd names in ALL GOOD THINGS were, in effect, the magazine’s back catalogue hung in one room.