Antony Micallef Biography
Despite being runner-up in the National Portrait Gallery’s BP/Amaco Portrait of the Year prize in 2000, Anthony has always turned down portrait commissions insisting not only that he’s a figurative painter, but that he could never see himself “inflicting brutal emotions on somebody I didn’t know.” At once colourfully beautiful and deeply troubling, Anthony’s work examines our dichotomous relationship with consumerism, examining how we can maintain to despise multi-national brands yet still allow ourselves to be seduced by them. “The trouble with pop imagery is that it doesn’t really go deeper than the surface” he says. “You have to drag it down and challenge it to make it interesting. When you put two contrasting images together, it causes friction, and that is the bit I’m interested in. Play a Britney Spears track and then follow it with a Nine Inch Nails tune – Britney no longer sounds the same, the union of two opposites make an intriguing and strange chemistry.” Described as ‘Caravaggio meets Manga’ and ‘Bacon in Disneyland’ this strong cocktail has already seen Anthony become enormously popular with collectors such as REM’s Michael Stipe.
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