Malaga artist Julio Anaya to exhibit at Saatchi London alongside Hirst, KAWS and Invader

The detail gives some idea of the stature of the institution where his work will now be shown: Saatchi Gallery, the London gallery that championed the Young British Artists in the 1990s and helped launch the careers of artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.

Anaya will have more than a single work on display in the group exhibition. The organisers of Beyond the Streets have set aside three metres of space for him to create an installation specifically for the show.

The artist from Malaga will bring together 16 pieces: five originals made for the occasion, one work that remains in his own collection and another ten from different collections.

There is no image of the installation yet, but Anaya has a clear idea of what he wants to do. He plans to go back to a time before the museum as we know it today existed, when paintings, stuffed animals, exotic objects, antiques and all manner of curiosities could coexist in what were known as cabinets of curiosities or chambers of wonders. "I'm interested in exploring where the work comes from," he tells SUR.

The concept plays heavily on the trompe-l'œil effects for which Anaya is known and on the need to look twice, something that is equally characteristic of his work. What looks like a piece of adhesive tape may actually be painted. The same can be true of a label, a shadow or the deterioration of a piece of cardboard.

And what appears from a few metres away to be a Picasso, Hockney or Basquiat may actually be a meticulous reproduction painted on a piece of cardboard picked up from the street. Because, as he puts it, "painting is the illusion of illusion".

Anaya will be exhibiting in London alongside KAWS, JR, Damien Hirst, Invader, Shepard Fairey and other major figures from contemporary art.

This is not the first time he has transformed an exhibition space into his own collection of wonders. The precursor to the installation he will create in London can be found almost 11,000 kilometres away in Tokyo. In September 2023, he presented 'Wunderkammer' at Nanzuka Underground, his first large-scale solo exhibition at the Japanese gallery. The title left little room for doubt: it means "chamber of wonders" or "cabinet of curiosities".

There, he brought together references from art history without much regard for conventional hierarchies. Dinosaur fossils and Egyptian mummies appeared alongside works by Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Hokusai and Warhol, while Astro Boy trainers and toys shared the space with works by Hajime Sorayama and Javier Calleja, the fellow Malaga artist and close friend.

Everything was filtered through trompe-l'œil and presented as a collection that deliberately turned the traditional hierarchy between great works of art and popular objects on its head.

The Japanese exhibition also produced one of Anaya's works that has subsequently travelled furthest. For 'Wunderkammer', he painted his own 'Guernica', roughly the same scale as Picasso's original but split into 18 fragments of salvaged cardboard.

After Tokyo, the work began its journey back to Malaga, where it was displayed at the city's own Russian Museum collection before becoming the centrepiece of last year's Guernica in Pieces exhibition at Picasso's Birthplace.

Anaya began by painting reproductions of masterpieces directly onto the walls of derelict buildings, beneath bridges and in other corners of the city. That approach to art makes him a natural fit for Beyond the Streets, an exhibition in which the gallery explores how street culture has made its way into art, photography, music, fashion and even activism over recent decades.

The exhibition will occupy more than ten rooms and spaces across three floors of the London gallery and bring together more than 100 international artists. Alongside paintings and sculptures, it will feature archives, large-scale installations such as Anaya's, interventions and works connected with the history of graffiti and hip-hop.

The line-up spans several generations of this history. Alongside Anaya will be graffiti pioneers such as Futura 2000, Lady Pink and Kenny Scharf; artists including Shepard Fairey, Invader, VHILS, Okuda San Miguel and Felipe Pantone; names that have long since entered major institutions, such as Jenny Holzer, the Guerrilla Girls and Damien Hirst; and global phenomena such as KAWS and JR.

Anaya himself describes Saatchi Gallery, which opened in 1985, as a "legendary" gallery.

The project, directed by graffiti historian Roger Gastman, arrived at the Saatchi Gallery in 2023 after touring cities including Los Angeles and New York and has become one of the notable milestones in the gallery's recent history. This time, the exhibition will be even more ambitious, opening on 11 November and running until 5 May 2027.

Charles Saatchi opened the gallery in London in 1985 and its exhibitions went on to give visibility to a generation that transformed the British art scene. It is a history in which Anaya's work naturally finds its place, just as his name now appears between those of JR and KAWS.