Tony Garifalakis, Angels of the Bottomless Pit

Tony Garifalakis, Angels of the Bottomless Pit

Hugo Michel Gallery

14^th February- 6^th March

Opening, 6pm 14^th February

Looking at the shadowy areas of contemporary culture, Melbourne based artist Tony Garifalakis sees the political as the cultural. He takes on a specific visual language to describe and subvert systems of power and authority. His exhibition, Angels of the Bottomless Pit, questions our ingrained social anxieties, in particular discussing how we understand who is the good guy and who is the bad guy in contemporary culture. Garifalakis investigates the concept of the anti-christ, not as a solitary figure, but as a multiple. The exhibition presents not one but many anti-christs, in figures such as Barack Obama, the Queen and the Pope. These figures sit equally amongst those who are more often seen as the enemy, Yasser Arafat, Osama Bin Laden and Silvio Berlusconi.

Garifalakis’ portraits are subverted; an inverted crucifix slices through the centre of each image in inverted colour. The political, cultural and religious leaders are accused as anti-christ’s, following the practice of extremists like Fred Phelps. The aesthetic of the portraits threatens violence and collapse, where does the line between good and evil exist? Garifalakis uses Christian symbolism, and the technique of inverting the colours to question the fixity of our public understanding of the figures, and of good and evil, power, and extremism.

 Image: Tony Garifalakis, Anti Christs (detail), 2013 courtesy of the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery

TEXT: Copyright Adele Sliuzas, originally published on the thousands