Sailing Back To Byzantium – Art of Michael Galovic

ISBN: 978-0-9756432-0-4

Michael Galovic’s traditional icons and religious paintings are just one small element in the world of art, a tradition thousands of years in the making. Used to decorate splendid cathedrals and modest churches alike, they are the visual representations of belief and the spiritual world that binds communities together. Michael Galovic uses a deep and sincere understanding of, and admiration for, traditional religious art, but brings to it subjects and ideas very much of his own time. It is a path that can be difficult and not without controversy, but he works with a genuine belief and a single minded determination to translate those ideas into powerful and engaging visual images. This book will reveal his work to a wider audience, bringing joy and understanding to those for whom religion and faith might be another world. But Michael is not content to rest on the success of his masterful icons, constantly taking his art into 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.

Gavin Fry (Yarra & Hunter Arts Press)

Book review by Wayne Hudson Canberra
Sailing Back to Byzantium
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
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)

Book review by Gordon Morrison
Sailing Back to Byzantium: Art of Michael Galovic

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
Sailing Back to Byzantium: Art of Michael Galovic, Yarra and Hunter Arts Press, 2024.

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. (click here for full review)