PRESS RELEASE

Sailing Back To Byzantium – Art of Michael Galovic 

Yarra & 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 Adam Wesselinoff catholicweekly.com.au

The re-enchantments of Michael Galovic

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)