Michael Zavros: The Favourite (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2023).
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21 October 2022. It was a dark and stormy night—unusual for Brisbane. My flight from Wellington had been delayed, so I had to get changed in the cab. I was racing into Fortitude Valley to catch openings by two local-hero artists running simultaneously—200 metres apart in reality, worlds apart artistically. Philip Bacon was unveiling Michael Zavros’s new show, Thomas Sees a Lion. Around the corner, the Institute of Modern Art was launching its survey of Waanyi artist Gordon Hookey. Zavros was offering deft photo-realist still lifes, where vases of flowers are arranged to suggest rabbits and jellyfish, while Hookey’s paintings were all politics—cartoony, riddled with slogans. The shows were chalk and cheese, but each had its own distinct fan base. A few of us in the business—with feet and friends in both camps—happily shuffled back and forth between them. It was a great chance to reflect on Zavros’s work in context and on the way it has riffed on art-world dynamics.
In the late 1990s, Michael Zavros seemed to arrive effortlessly, fully formed. Graduating from Queensland College of Art in Brisbane in 1996, he quickly found fame as a photorealist painter, rendering fashion-plate images of men in designer suits and shiny shoes, on the runway and doing deals. These sartorial studies were jewels, often small enough to hold in your hand. For me, they recalled Robert Longo’s photorealist Men in the Cities (1977–83), which showed young Wall Street types contorted as if dancing or dying, while eschewing that dystopian dimension. Zavros’s images came direct from fashion magazines, unfazed, unapologetically fusing beauty and authority, power and privilege. They established his MO: paint beautiful things beautifully, no apology, no alibi. As he continued, Zavros’s canon of quality subjects expanded to include thoroughbred horses, peacocks, and pedigree Onagadori chickens; period rooms and contemporary interiors; formal gardens and follies; jewels and perfume bottles; luxury cars and luxury handbags. His oeuvre became a world unto itself—choice bits of the real world, insulated from the real-world squalor that made them possible.
Zavros became a golden boy. He won prizes: the Moran in 2010, the Bulgari in 2012, the Mossman in 2016. His projects were successful and about his success. For the 2014 Melbourne Art Fair, he had male models, the Stenmark twins, dispense gold-coin MZ-monogram chocolates from a Rolls Royce Wraith. In 2016, he titled his Philip Bacon show A Million Dollars Exhibition. He and his curator-writer wife Alison Kubler became celebrities, society-page staples, wormholes between the garret and the gala. Everything Zavros did seemed to be news. He was favoured. He was commissioned to paint Governor-General Quentin Bryce and war hero Ben Roberts-Smith.
As his fame and fortune grew, Zavros’s work seemed less aspirational, more autobiographical, illustrating the good life he could now live. Into his work, he incorporated references to his own trophy possessions and to himself. As a svelte, handsome man, he fitted seamlessly into his own pantheon of beauty and privilege. His self portrait V12/Narcissus (2009)—showing him reflecting on and reflected in his Mercedes—referred to the myth of a beautiful boy fatally seduced by his own reflection. Short-circuiting subject and object, it made an analogy between the self-satisfied artist enjoying his reflection in his new car and the self-satisfied collector-owner who might admire themself reflected in his painting. Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors would become a favoured Zavros subject, his whole oeuvre became a metaphorical hall of mirrors, with each subject reflected in all the others. In 2009, he presented a show of drawings of designer handbags alongside actual designer handbags in Jean Brown, a Brisbane designer-handbag store. Reality and representation had become interchangeable.
When I was Director at the Institute of Modern Art in the late 2000s, early 2010s, Zavros was a talking point. Some loved him (and what he represented), some hated him (and what he represented). For his lovers, his work affirmed their idea of art (beauty, luxury, craft, privilege); for his haters, it was everything art shouldn’t be (beauty, luxury, craft, privilege). His fans couldn’t get enough; his haters had had enough—they burred up with every new glossy-magazine column inch toasting his refined art, his charmed life, and his picture-perfect family, and resented him hogging the limelight. He was not their people.
In 2010, at the Institute, I made a show with Zavros, partly because—as an avant-garde outpost—it was the last thing we were supposed to do, and, to me, that seemed interesting. That year, Zavros began incorporating his kids into his art, starting with his first, daughter Phoebe. ‘She was wanting to be very grown up and she would act like a little lady and she wear these little plastic heels that we got her from Crazy Clarks and she liked to put on makeup’, he said. ‘She would regard herself in the mirror, or she would pose for you in front of the camera.’
My IMA show—a two-hander with Scott Redford—included Zavros’s first video, We Dance in the Studio (To that Shit on the Radio) (2010). It found the artist painting in his studio accompanied by the five-year-old—in a tutu, shades, and Mouseketeer hat— in front of a mirror, dancing and posing to Lady Gaga’s hit ‘Paparazzi’. The work was observational, recording something his ‘little monster’ already did instinctively, as if it were in her nature not her nurture, while nevertheless embodying her family’s upmarket lifestyle. A chip off the old block, she performed Zavros’s thesis for him as he continued painting in the background, as though her innocent childish narcissism legitimised his studied adult narcissism—because maybe she was ‘born this way’.
Phoebe also played dead a lot. Zavros made a painting of her doing so, wrapped in an Alexander McQueen skull scarf. Phoebe Is Dead / McQueen (2010) was provocative, combining a status symbol (that shroud scarf) with real tragedy (McQueen had just killed himself). Perhaps it suggested fashion’s transcendental power, perhaps not. Perhaps it suggested neglect, perhaps not. The work certainly revolved around a Catch–22: those who want to protect children are always imagining—fantasising—terrible things that might befall them.
Zavros would paint precocious Pheobe, showing off in Tom Ford and Linda Farrow sunglasses, playing a mermaid, wearing fur coats too big for her, munching on jewellery—always an attention seeker. In the giant portrait Amore (2018), her exaggerated hair and fire-engine-red lipstick suggest a child impatient to be an adult. She was only 14 and obsessed with YouTube makeup tutorials. While these images were based on observation of what Phoebe already did, they were also what Zavros chose to paint, for his own reasons.
Zavros would go on to make similarly coy paintings, photos, and videos of son Leo, often bare bodied, wearing a rainbow wig, bathing, posing before a fan, and swamped in an adult jacket. In White Crash (2019), however, Leo stands in front of a smashed-up white luxury SUV looking troubled, with storm clouds reflected in its tinted windows—for Zavros, a rare critique of white privilege and status.
Zavros began picturing his children during a time of moral panic around the depiction of children in art. In 2008, the Australian art scene was paralysed by the wildfire controversy over Bill Henson’s photos of under-age subjects. Zavros was on the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council when it drafted its Protocols for Working with Children in Art in response. So he knowingly chose to work in this hot-potato area, as a commentary on it. Taking pleasure in his children’s beauty and coquetry, investing his vanity in theirs, he plays on line calls between child and adult, innocent and knowing, raising questions about parenting and privilege. These works split audiences. Some find them creepy, others charming, but so much is in the eye of the beholder.
Occasionally, works have stirred up trouble. In 2021, HOTA—the new art museum on the Gold Coast, Zavros’s hometown—opened with a collection show, including his painting Zeus/Zavros (2018), a recent acquisition. It showed Phoebe and Leo in their backyard pool cavorting with an inflatable-swan pool toy. There were calls forthe painting be taken down, because, it was claimed, in baring Leo’s bottom, it promoted peadophilia. To most, however, the painting would have seemed entirely benign. ‘What’s the problem?’, I thought. ‘Aren’t art museums where we expect to see bums. Putti, cherubs, and cupids are staples of Old-Master art. So why make an example of Zavros? ‘
However, strangely, throughout this mini-furore, angered parties failed to mention the work’s provocative title. Zeus/Zavros was a nod to Greek mythology. According to legend, the god Zeus metamorphosed into a swan to ‘rape’ Leda. In the Renaissance, the erotic implications of the tale energised works by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and others. Read through its title, Zavros’s painting becomes more ominous. Phoebe hangs from the neck of the inflatable-swan pool toy, vulnerable, while Leo rides on its back, as if Zeus in hiding. Into this more-or-less idyllic suburban scene, where his own children are the subjects, the title introduces suggestions of child sexuality, violation, and incest. But it’s the framing title that surely adds the trouble, not what is shown. It’s meta—a double entendre. (I’m reminded of Paolo Veronese, who took the opposite route, escaping a heresy charge by retitling his dodgy 1573 Last Supper painting The Feast in the House of Levi.)
Of late, Zavros’s work has itself polarised, splitting into two paths. He continues to produce immaculate paintings, including those deft still lifes beloved by collectors, but he’s also developed a flair for self parody, as if reaching out to his haters. In 2020, he made a funny video for Griffith University’s online Lockdown Studio series, taking the piss out of himself, while nevertheless presuming his persona and lifestyle were familiar to all. To a Vivaldi soundtrack, he appears in his lavish studio in a dressing gown, stating, proudly, ‘I’m making a painting that will go into a museum show in Germany next year. Today I’m painting the water. I love painting water.’ As the kids couldn’t go to school, they joined him in the studio. Zavros claims to support their free expression—‘We are all artists here.’—but we witness his distain at their lame efforts. Pets—Mars the cat and Finch Farm Bono the horse—have also invaded the studio. Leo holds up Mars so Zavros can paint him, asleep under the tyre of a red Merc—as if roadkill in waiting. The film is attributed to daughter Olympia.
The Dad works addresses those who complain that Zavros is superficial, plastic, in love with himself, Mr Perfect. Zavros talks about Dad as a sharper version of himself, but the dummy looks dead and dopey, with stiff poses and a vacant expression. And the detachable head is a giveaway. One journalist described it as the garrotted-Ken-Doll look. To me, much of Zavros’s description of these works is wilful misdirection. They play on the idea that he is a narcissist, in love with himself, but undermine the fantasy.
When Sydney gallery Sullivan and Strumpf presented the Dad images in a solo show in late 2020, it released a promo video, which I like to think of as a work in itself. It’s even more off-putting, more tragic, than the photos. After we see the artist tending his horses, he confronts his substitute. We hear him explaining, deadpan, ‘I’d call him Dad, that strange word that replaced my name, and in some way replaced me. Maybe he’ll be a good dad, an engaged one, a listener. The kids would love him.’ Then we join Dad at the dinner table with the kids, as they continue, either preferring the plastic version or oblivious to the difference, as the real Zavros looks on from afar.
The Dad works play on the repugnance that emerges from the ‘uncanny valley’, when lifeless representations appear almost lifelike. They also nod to fairy tales like Pinocchio and android movies like Ex Machina that channel the pathos of artificial beings, desiring agency and status in the world. The Dad works are weird and confusing, generating interference patterns. They may have been a bridge too far for the artist’s loyal buyer base,
5 November 2022. I’m back in New Zealand, and Zavros has just Instagrammed me a new photo, Rom Com, asking what I think. Dad and Phoebe stand back to back. Over her shoulder, she yanks him by the tie—perhaps throttling him. She looks at the camera, at us, smiling; he looks dopey, with dead eyes. The work’s a power play—it’s about agency. Phoebe is now grown up and seems to be getting the better of her father. Now, it’s like she’s in charge, running the show. Of course, the real Michael Zavros is standing behind the camera, directing the action. So maybe he’s still in charge, perhaps getting some perverse thrill from seeing his avatar bested (albeit by his own flesh and blood).
The image is familiar. I know I’ve seen it somewhere before. Of course! It’s based on the promo image for the film Pretty Woman, with Dad replacing Richard Gere (as Edward Lewis) and Phoebe replacing Julia Roberts (as Vivian Ward). That rather twists things. Pretty Woman was made in 1990, a lifetime ago, fifteen years before Phoebe was born. Ward, an LA streetwalker, is picked up by Lewis, a bored corporate raider who needs some arm candy for upcoming social events. But they fall in love: ‘She walked off the street, into his life and stole his heart’, reads the tagline. The film was a huge hit, cementing Roberts’s career, even if the story was implausible, eliding the grubby, uneven power dynamics necessitated by such exchanges in reality. That’s what made it magical.
Zavros’s work here is about intertextuality. Trying to read his photo through Pretty Woman sends my brain into a tail spin of contradictory thoughts. Having Lewis and Ward played by Dad and Phoebe triggers uncomfortable incest overtones, if your mind goes there—mine does. I’m reminded of ‘Something Stupid’, the love-song duet by father Frank and daughter Nancy Sinatra that went to number one in 1967. (Interestingly, atthe time of Pretty Woman’s release, Gere was 40, Roberts just 22, but the age difference was largely overlooked.) In the Pretty Woman poster, Gere’s in a suit while Roberts wears kinky thigh-high boots—business attire for both. But, in the Zavros image, Dad’s in a suit and Phoebe’s in a neutral white blouse and a demure long black skirt. If either party is sexualised, perhaps it’s Dad, who’s become a doll, a passive object to play with, a psychological chew toy.
Is the photo a feminist statement? Ward and Phoebe grabb Lewis and Dad by their ties—their phallic symbols. Or is that a coy conceit—just another male fantasy? (Zavros has make paintings of foppish designer ties, standing upright, like cobras ready to strike.) In the photo, Phoebe eyes the camera and us, and smiles. But isshe in on the joke? From where she’s standing, in front of the camera, does she know she’s being directed into the Pretty Woman promo pose? Is the film even a reference point for her? We can only guess.
Zavros has said he thinks of his Phoebe images as self portraits. Perhaps Dad and Phoebe are both facets of him. I wonder, then, if this work might also be read in terms of his own rags-to-riches Cinderella story, as a Greek kid on the Gold Coast, seduced by fashion, aspiring to a perfect art-life.
On Instagram, Rom Com was accompanied by a note: ‘What do you think? Should I put it in the Queensland Art Gallery show?’ I replied: ‘Why not? They can only execute you once.’