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PRESS RELEASEYarra & Hunter Arts Press
We are delighted to announce the release of ‘Sailing Back to Byzantium’, a brilliant new hardback volume featuring the work of Michael Galovic, a leading exponent of traditional icons and religious art in Australia. Several authors, including the artist himself, have their articles and essays accompanying different works and illuminating them with a light that will help the reader to understand both the artworks and the artist.
Michael Galovic’s traditional icons and religious artworks are just one small element in the world of art, a tradition thousands of years in the making. Used to decorate magnificent cathedrals and modest churches alike, they are the visual representation of belief and spiritual worlds that bind people and communities together. With his experience of over 50 years of icon-making, Michael employs his deep and sincere understanding of, and admiration for, traditional religious art, but also brings to it subjects and ideas very much of our own time. It is the road less travelled which he walks with genuine belief and a single minded determination to translate those ideas into powerful and engaging visual images.
This publication showcases the work of someone who still stubbornly uses egg tempera on traditionally gessoed hard surfaces with up to 12 layers, whether the artwork is a traditional icon or a contemporary rendition of an ancient theme. All this single-mindedness combined with the relentless grit of hardly missing a day’s work results in a prodigious output. Michael’s works are in well over 100 churches and institutions and numerous private collections in Australia and beyond.
There are other traditional iconographers but very seldom those who also endlessly and boldly experiment with one foot in the past and the other in the future. Michael is never content to rest on the success of his masterful icons, constantly taking his art to new places and forms of expression. His works reflect significant philosophical, cultural and artistic concepts; the results of an unceasing curiosity with the ways of our world and have long been embedded in the tapestry of cultural life in this country.
This brilliantly designed volume is a must for a beginner in the practice of iconography as well as the seasoned practitioner and lovers of religious art alike. Its 260 pages give us a kaleidoscopic spread of one marvel after another as a testament of what can be done if you combine a belief in what you do with a ceaseless questioning of it and a pushing of your own boundaries, irrespective of how contradictory that may sound. Michael’s background in graduating from the Belgrade Academy of Art shows how one can build from a solid foundation and then give a contemporary guise to an ancient structure, being never afraid of failure.
BOOK REVIEW by Wayne Hudson Canberra
Sailing to Byzantium (Yarra & Hunter Arts Press, 2024) is a collection of the art of Michael Galovic.It is magnificently produced and includes substantive text. Michael’s icons and religious paintings draw on a tradition thousands of years in the making, while introducing at times elements that are radically new. Much of his work is translucent and other worldly in the Byzantine tradition, but also creative, original and extensional. It speaks powerfully to secular audiences because the content to which his iconography refers is present in the best works themselves. Australians are awestruck in the presence of art which seeks to repeat what has been achieved before; and also stimulated by works which are clearly contemporary. Michael’s work addresses the sacred, but it often does so in a radically modern or postsecular perspective. The traditionally religious are animated by the devotional quality in many of his works and it is no surprise that his work is now displayed in over a hundred churches and institutions. The postreligious, however, are also drawn in by sacral elements which embody a coherence and intensity which has been largely lost in the modern West. In Michael’s work the sacral is re-presented to the religious, the postreligious and the postsecular alike as something which belongs to our cosmo-anthropological reality, to use a term from Orthodox theology. In the same way, Michael’s art is ethnically specific, but also universal, and so offers a critique of the empty universalism of Western secularism. Michael also addresses the meaning of Australian subject matter such as the significance of Uluru. He is always ready to embrace the new, while renewing the ancient. His achievement is to transcend divisions between times and places by evoking them in a way that recharges our cultural memories. Michael Galovic is a master magician, and we are immensely proud that he has chosen to work his magic in Australia.
BOOK REVIEW by Adam Wesselinoff catholicweekly.com.au
Michael Galovic’s status as Australia’s leading religious artist is cemented with the release of his new retrospective, Sailing Back to Byzantium. The lavishly produced collection from Yarra & Hunter Arts Press ranges widely over the last 17 years of his artistic career. Profoundly enjoyable as an art object in its own right, suitable even for prayer and meditation, the monograph is a gift to the reader seeking a deeper understanding of both iconography and contemporary art, as it contains extensive reflections from the artist and a host of knowledgeable interlocutors. It deserves to be read by any Christian interested in the living tradition and possibilities of religious art. (click here for full review)
BOOK REVIEW by Gordon Morrison
How should we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? Ps.136 (137)
A new monograph on the art of Serbian Australian iconographer Michael Galovic, titled “Sailing Back to Byzantium”, endeavours to answer this question, posed in the psalm we know today as “ By the Waters of Babylon”. The book’s title paraphrases another poem, William Butler Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”, in which Constantinople, the Queen of Cities and Mother of Orthodoxy, is described as an ultimate spiritual goal, a place where “sages stand in God’s holy fire as in the gold mosaic of wall”. The Psalmist on the other hand is an exile, torn from his homeland and far from holy ground. (click here for full review)
BOOK REVIEW by Rod Pattenden
This lavish, large format publication on the work of iconographer Michael Galovic is a welcome addition to the coverage of the arts and spirituality in Australia. It is a beautiful book, an art work in itself. In around 260 pages it surveys the work of one of Australia’s most well known painters of icons, covering traditional themes, innovative new work, and important commissions around the country.
Born in Belgrade, Michael Galovic arrived in Australia in 1990 and set about sharing his cultural knowledge through small exhibitions and workshops. The 2006 publication Icons and Art provided a visual overview of the first 15 years of his art production. This new and more generous publication covers the next 17 years providing an overview of this important innovator and translator of the Orthodox tradition.
The book is divided into sections covering such themes as the Annunciation, the Son of Man, Theotokos, Angels, and more innovative themes such as Uluru as icon, and more experimental ideas that explore the nature of spirituality in multi-cultural Australia. These are supported by 24 short writing sections that address issues of technique, history and theological themes. These are provided by the artist as well as a range of authors from art historical or theological perspectives. This enriches the book as a wider resource in understanding the role of the icon as a source of spirituality and the role that vision has in informing spiritual responses.
What is clear is the immense skill and labour that is needed to follow in this ancient tradition and to make each work come alive through a fresh illumination, rather than appearing as a tired copy. Galovic is a keen student of the past and pays great respect to traditional techniques. He has, however, also allowed himself to experiment with fresh ideas and approaches and has found inspiration in a wide variety of sources including modern art, and the art of indigenous Australians.
The extensive range of commissions have allowed him to enliven the worshipping spaces of a wide variety of churches, chapels, and schools and to renew this tradition as a lively and contemporary form of seeing faith. This book provides rich resources for understanding this tradition and for appreciating this artist and his life’s work.
The book will be launched at an event in Sydney on Sunday 28th July, to be held at All Saints Church Ambrose St, Hunters Hill at 4pm. This book is available from the artist through his website. A great addition to a personal library, a beautiful gift, or an important resource in a school or college library.
BOOK REVIEW by Art Almanac – Dr Joseph Brennan
… An artwork itself, the book’s two hundred and sixty pages are decorated with works of ethereal beauty, packed with layers of medium (tempera and gold leaf on board) and meaning, a testament to Galovic’s creative input, his understanding and rejuvenation of traditional techniques fused with influences by Modern and Indigenous art and culture. Sailing Back to Byzantium: Art of Michael Galovic both educates and enlightens. (full book review available to subscribers to the Art Almanac)
