Johnny Romeo

Too Funky

Name: Too Funky - Harvey Galleries
SKU: H36017
Price: 6500.00 AUD
Availability: InStock

SKU: H36017

Acrylic and Oil on Canvas

103 x 103 cm Framed

A$6,500

Dust off your dancing shoes and whip on your Sunday best as you head to the Church of disco with Too Funky, Johnny Romeo’s bold celebration of Pop music icon George Michael. Too Funky struts onto the canvas with unapologetic glamour as Romeo reimagines the beloved singer as a sanctified queer icon adorned with a vibrant Renaissance-style halo and chic aviator sunglasses. Straddling the line between the sacred and the sensual, the work playfully riffs on Sydney artist Scott Marsh’s infamous mural of a Wham! -era Michael painted as the patron saint of Pride. Marsh’s mural sparked headlines after it was defaced and painted over in what many consider a hateful attack on the piece’s celebration of the LGBTQ community. However, what couldn’t stay on the streets returns to the canvas in radiant defiance as Romeo carries on Marsh’s mission, upgrading the youthful vibes of the original mural with an older, wiser BBC portrait of George Michael as a proud, elder champion of gay rights. Brimming with iridescent colours, Too Funky is a camp, confident collision of divinity and disco, where sexual freedom and primal desire take to the dancefloor in the ultimate ‘Shake Down’. Romeo pushes this idea further with the word assemblage ‘Shake Town’, inviting his audience to join a rainbow congregation where all forms of love are celebrated and dancing becomes a radical, revolutionary act. With his love of dance music and club culture, George Michael has penned some of Pop culture’s most lauded anthems of liberation. The spirit of Michael’s music is vibrantly captured in the title Too Funky, which takes its name from one Michael’s most recognisable tunes (‘Too Funky, 1992) and boldly reframes the song’s libidinous call to ‘show you heaven if you want me to’ into a holy hymn to free love and self-expression.

H36017 Too Funky, 2025

$6,500
or $1,300 x 5 months with Art Money

In stock

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About Johnny Romeo

Johnny Romeo is an internationally acclaimed Australian painter, widely regarded as Australia’s leading Pop artist. As a seminal figure in the global Neo-Expressionist Pop movement, Romeo fuses the irreverent swagger of rock’n’roll with the visual semiotics of comic books and the raw immediacy of street art. GQ Magazine Australia aptly described his aesthetic as ‘part punk, part pop’, a stylistic hybrid that defines Romeo’s vivid, neon-drenched works and its balance of candy colour explosions and punchy, rebellious imagery. Romeo’s signature Kitsch Pop paintings are electrifying visual assemblages, combining Technicolour palettes and urban iconography to produce a visceral, high-octane art experience.