Address at the Opening of Michael Galovic’s Exhibition Kyrie Eleison Lord Have Mercy

Michael Galovic’s ikons and religious paintings draw on a tradition thousands of years in the making, while introducing 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 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 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’s latest exhibition, Kyrie Eleison, demonstrates the continuing power of his work. Michael is not only an iconographer. He produces polysemantic work which refuses a single interpretation. He combines iconography in the Serbian Orthodox tradition with radicalisms that addresses multiple Australian audiences. Michael draws his inspiration from Orthodox theology. In his work the tension between icons as dualistic sacral presentations which direct our attention away from the real world and its problems and icons as immanent presences is overcome. In the same way, the distance between the divine and the human which becomes extreme in some forms of Protestantism does not appear in Michael’s work. Instead, anthropology and cosmosophy or a sacral interpretation of the universe interpenetrate. The Protestant emphasis on subjective faith is not present. Instead, the Orthodox emphasis on the salvation of the entire universe, including all peoples and animals, is presented as something glorious which does not depend on human actions or beliefs. This gives his work intensity, especially when he relates it to the dangerously disordered present or to eschatological events such as September 11

Characteristically, Michael addresses the events of September 11 from both apocalyptical and eschatological perspectives. Consistent with Orthodox theology, his work is oriented towards the eschatology which appears in the present. It is about the salvation of the universe, including all people and all animals, and is based on the eschatological hope that the divine mercy will eventually prevail. His theology is theocentric and not the pietism of much of the Western church which equates salvation with the salvation of individuals who hold the correct theological beliefs. In Michael’s art the sacral is related to divine redeeming power. With this in mind, we might attempt to read his icons as a process rather than as merely separate images. We will then experience the tension between Michael’s traditionalism and his debts to Cubism and Picasso. We will also perhaps experience the tension between the ikon as the representation of a hierarchic order and the ikon as a dialectical critique of the world at hand.

The eight panels presented here are individual but also moments in a process which ends with a stunning image of Christ. The soteriology is not individual but cosmic. The remembrances of Picasso and the Cubists terminate in the finality of Yves Klein’s blue and with the hope that the divine Mercy will appear.

Michael Galovic is a master magician, and we are immensely proud that he has chosen to work his magic is Australia.

Wayne Hudson

Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture