Tony Garifalakis

Tony Garifalakis is showing in Hope Dies Last: Art at the End of Optimism at Gertrude Contemporary. Curated by Mark Feary, Hope Dies Last spans two spaces, Gertrude Contemporary and Margaret Lawrence Gallery and presents a selection of Australian and international contemporary art.

Hope Dies Last self-identifies as “one of the most depressing events of the year,” promising to leave audiences emotionally crippled and wracked with negativity. It puts the dead in deadpan, examining our own mortality, suffering and failure through the lens of gallows humour.

Nicola Dowse

Hope Dies Last is on display at Gertrude Contemporary from October 5 to November 9, and at Margaret Lawrence Gallery from October 18 to November 14.

Tony Garifalakis is now showing in The National 2019: New Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The National is a celebration of contemporary Australian art. The second of three biennial survey exhibitions, it showcases work being made across the country by artists of different generations and cultural backgrounds. Through ambitious new and commissioned projects, the 70 artists featured across three venues respond to the times in which they live, presenting observations that are provocative, political, and poetic. The National is a partnership between the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. This year, it has been curated by Isobel Parker Philip (AGNSW), Daniel Mudie Cunningham (Carriageworks), and Clothilde Bullen (MCA), and Anna Davis (MCA). Working in close dialogue, they have developed three distinct presentations of new Australian art that together highlight many of the ideas and concerns motivating artists in Australia today.

Macushla Robinson has examined the new works in the exhibition:

A series of abstract images, float-mounted on corkboard, hang on a timber veneer wall. You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, but they were born out of the pages of POMANTƩO (Romantso), a Greek romance magazine popular in the 1970s. We buy magazines for pleasure and consume them in idle time. We put them in stacks in the corners of our houses. They are not highly prized collectibles and neither are they entirely disposable. These particular magazines were written in the Greek language and read in Australia, and as such they represent both an unattainable fantasy and a comforting, familiar consumable. I imagine someone reading them in a living room panelled with timber veneer, thick carpet you can still smell, a boxy television, and an orange lampshade. The home, like the magazines, would be at once aspirational and comfortable.

Read the full essay here.

Exhibition runs until June 23.

National Anthem, featuring Tony Garifalakis and Paul Yore, and curated by Kate Just, is now showing at Buxton Contemporary.

Presenting a cacophonous array of artistic voices and perspectives, National Anthem brings together 24 artists, from a range of generations, who critically address Australian national identity. Built around key works in the Michael Buxton Collection, together with works sourced from beyond the collection, this project reflects on the ways that the desire for a singular national identity often excludes Indigenous histories and denies the multiplicity of voices, cultures and experiences that enrich, contest, and enhance Australian life.
Channelling humour and satire and engaging in tactics such as play, intervention and confrontation, the artists in National Anthem seek self-determination and collectively hold a mirror up to contemporary Australia, prompting new representations of who we are or who we might aspire to become.

Exhibition runs until July 7.

The National 2019: New Australian Art will be launching the second of three ambitions survey exhibitions across multiple sites on March 29, 2019. The 2019 exhibition is curated by each venue comprising of AGNSW Curator of Photographs, Isobel Parker Philip; Carriageworks Senior Curator of Visual Arts, Daniel Mudie Cunningham; and MCA Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections and Exhibitions, Clothilde Bullen alongside MCA Curator, Anna Davis.

As in its first year, the exhibition showcases new and commissioned work by contemporary Australian artists encompassing a diverse range of media including painting, video, photography, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance. The National 2019 will continue the project’s curatorial ambitions as a large-scale survey of contemporary Australian art in the form of three distinct exhibitions that explore overlapping themes including hierarchy and power, dystopic futures, and ritual and improvisation.

Tony Garifalakis will exhibit at the Art Gallery of New South Wales alongside 23 other artists in an presentation that Isobel Parker Philip describes to “reveal how Australian artists are responding with subtlety and intensity to the times they live in, through artworks that are intricate, complex and often charged with a sense of precariousness.”

Art Gallery of New South Wales: 29 March – 21 July 2019
Carriageworks: 29 March – 23 June 2019
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia: 29 March – 23 June 2019

For full details about The National visit here.

Hugo Michell Gallery invites you to the opening of WORD, an ambitious group exhibition presenting text-based work from nearly 30 artists.

Featuring: Abdul Abdullah, Roy Ananda, Brook Andrew, Narelle Autio, David Booth [Ghostpatrol], Jon Campbell, James Dodd, Will French, Tony Garifalakis, Lucas Grogan, Kate Just, Anastasia Klose, Sue Kneebone, Alice Lang, Richard Lewer, Sophia Nuske, Nana Ohnesorge, Trent Parke, Philjames, Kenny Pittock, Toby Pola, Tom Polo, Elvis Richardson, Derek Sargent, Paul Sloan, Sera Waters, Gerry Wedd, Min Wong, and Paul Yore.

From raw mark-making to a choreographed line, text allows us to transfer ideas and connect universally. It is a coded form of communication that negotiates language and dialect. WORD presents a library of pithy phrases and sensitive secrets that span the entire gallery.

Please join us on Thursday the 30th of August to celebrate.

See the Facebook event here.

As part of the Australia in Turkey 2015 cultural interchange, Tony Garifalakis is exhibiting in Neverwhere at Gaia Gallery in Istanbul. Garifalakis exhibits in Neverwhere alongside other Australian artists Brook Andrew, Mikala Dwyer, Lou Hubbard, Veronica Kent, Claire Lambe, Clare Milledge, and Kathy Temin. Curated by Vikki McInnes, Neverwhere presents a range of artistic backgrounds to create a display of national identity through diverse symbolic acts.

To find out more visit Neverwhere | The Guide Istanbul.

Image: Tony Garifalakis, Untitled #28, 2014, from Mob Rule (Family Series), enamel on type C print, 60 x 40 cm unframed, unique edition of 2.