Contemporary
Unholy Icons
This series gathers figures from the last two centuries whom I personally consider iconic—individuals whose images, ideas, or presence have left a lasting mark on contemporary culture.
The title Contemporary Unholy Icons plays on the visual language of Byzantine icons: black and white portraits set against gold backgrounds, where the gold functions less as decoration than as a symbolic field that elevates the subject.
Unlike traditional sacred icons, these figures are not saints but cultural protagonists—artists, thinkers, rebels, and public personalities. Their portraits originate from photographs, reworked through digital collage and later printed using Gelli plate techniques, producing textures that echo the materiality of printmaking.
The reference to Byzantine art is therefore distant but deliberate: gold as a sign of reverence, the portrait as a focal presence. In this series, however, devotion gives way to a personal canon—an informal pantheon of “unholy” icons from modern history.
