In the concurrent exhibitions at Adelaide’s Hugo Michell Gallery this August, two Greek-heritage artists use a process-based practice to explore pattern, design, and impact that carry through the two gallery spaces. In the larger room, Tony Garifalakis’s Endism (doom sessions) features a mass of works on paper, while in the smaller space, Hari Koutlakis continues the structured approach with a striking black-and-white installation.

Tony Garifalakis
Endism (doom sessions)

Comprising one hundred A2 works on paper (approximately 60 × 42cm), Endism (doom sessions) by Melbourne-based artist Tony Garifalakis evokes the visual overload of a late-night social media scroll. Defined by his signature dark humour and layered iconography drawn from popular culture, the works span multiple media and low-fi aesthetics. Collage, paint, drawing, digital print, and photography combine to depict obscure imagery, as though extracted from an esoteric dream – or nightmare – inviting a cognitive scrambling of meaning.

Presented unframed in five groups of twenty, the works are installed against a crude black plastic backdrop that runs across the wall. As Garifalakis notes, “There’s a mixture of styles. It’s all over the shop . . . there’s a crudity to it which attracts me, and the mode of presentation will highlight that.”

The conceptual framework of the series emerges organically rather than thematically. The exhibition foregrounds process itself: the outcome of Garifalakis’s intuitive and accumulative mode of making. The way the works are read reveals as much about the viewer as the artist – whether the imagery feels familiar or unfamiliar, legible or opaque, depends on individual visual literacy and cultural memory.

The installation evokes the layered logic of a conspiracy board or a nightclub toilet wall, where disparate fragments accumulate into unstable networks of association. The glossy black background intensifies this sense of fragmentation, drawing attention to the tension between surface, image, and interpretation. Endism (doom sessions) immerses the viewer in a field of competing modalities, where meaning is continuously constructed and undone.

Hari Koutlakis
Mass information

Exploring a methodology of pattern and tessellation, the surrealist roomscapes of Adelaide-based Hari Koutlakis riff on a high-contrast, black-and-white visual language. The artist draws inspiration from the curiosity and movement of landscapes, rendering rolling hills in graphic, geometric forms. A contemporary version of M. C. Escher, the oscillating artworks are created through a pull toward connection – each installation is the result of a process-driven practice.

“As the work evolves, it’s informed by the other sections, an ongoing state of play with shape and movement. I keep finding ways to accentuate shapes and movement within these black-and-white flat paintings,” says Koutlakis. “It’s more than thinking about the drawing and the composition. It’s about the process of making this pattern.”

In Mass information – the artist’s first commercial show after a decade-long practice spanning installations and murals – Koutlakis presents a sculptural element pouring from the corner of the room. The pattern bleeds onto the floor, distorted by dense black-and-white geometric forms and optical effects.

The oscillating installation extends Koutlakis’s relationship to making, inviting an inward state of attention and reflection. Black and white functions as a distilled visual language, allowing process and repetition to take precedence over narrative resolution, offering the artist an opportunity to consider his personal story through an almost limitless process of repetition.

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Emma-Kate Wilson is an art critic and design writer based on Bundjalung Country in northern New South Wales.

 

Hugo Michell Gallery
30 July to 22 August 2026
South Australia

Originally published in print – Art Almanac, August 2026 issue, pp. 29–33