Michael Zavros » Exhibitions

Sydney Contemporary 2018

Michael Zavros — Tue, 11 Sep 2018 06:51:35 +0000

Starkwhite will present a group show at Sydney Contemporary, from 13-16 September, featuring the work of pioneer experimental filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye, along with works by contemporary practitioners Rebecca Baumann, Seung Yul Oh and Michael Zavros.

New Zealand born artist Len Lye (1901-1980) is recognised internationally as a pioneer in the field of experimental film and kinetic art. He spent his career pursuing the “art of movement” with film where he pioneered direct filmmaking (films made without a camera) by scratching or painting directly onto celluloid film. Our presentation will focus on his kinetic work with two key sculptures – Rotating Harmonic (1959) and Roundhead (1961). Rotating Harmonic is one of Lye’s classic works. From one simple steel rod, Lye coxes the fundamental principles of harmonic motions that underlie his work. ‘Well, I found I could spell out the whole business of energy being absorbed…in this carbon steel (rod).” Roundhead is one of the the artist’s most delicate kinetic sculptures comprising four concentric circles that spin in space, with a sparse ambient sound track. The works are from the the Len Lye collection and archive held in the Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth, which is New Zealand’s first art museum dedicated to a single artist.

Rebecca Baumann explores the relationship between colour, light and time in her work, notably in her ongoing series of automated colour fields. The ACFs consist of grids of split-panel flip clocks, each with the number cards replaced with cards of solid colour. The result is a vast and affecting (and constantly changing) field of colour. Like changing numbers on a clock, the cards flip on each clock on the minute (on the right hand side) and on the hour (on the left hand side) – revealing the endless combinations of the palette. The title of the automated colour field works, and its link to the Gerhard Richter’s colour-chart series, points to a connection with painting. Yet while Baumann draws from an understanding of the art historical role of colour, her focus remains a study of how colour elicits emotions. We will present her latest variation, which is also her largest to date. Automated Colour Field (Variation 8) measures 1290 x 5030 x 90 mm, produced as an edition of three. The first work in the edition was acquired by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and is showing their current exhibition Toi Art .

Seung Yul Oh is well known for whimsical art works that toy with scale, but running parallel to these playful art works is Oh’s painting, a formal and sometimes minimalist practice, which the artist has described as ‘musical’ and offering moments of balance and counterpoint. We will present new works from his Horizontal Loop series where he continues his practice of working the edges, expanding on previous examples and moving away from conventional focus on the canvas. Suggestive of architectural features such as doorways or the front of a building, there are now are only four elements: simply open space framed by painted wooden bars. Made from cylindrical rods and rectangular sections of timber, these works exist as an outline of form. Here, the absence becomes content. He also exploits the expressive power of colour in this series. Oh’s reductionist and geometric compositions allow both vivid contrast and subtle nuance of tone. “I’m interested in the relationship between colours, how they sit side by side, the tension or rhythm they create. There’s uncertainty when these colours are joined. This clash, or harmony, generates a dimension of dialogue when they’re placed next to each other” he comments.

Michael Zavros paints beautiful things beautifully. His subjects include European palaces, gardens and follies; up-market men’s fashion, flowers, luxury cars and jewellery; Lipizzaner dressage horses and Japanese pedigree onagadori chickens. Increasingly the artist is turning his gaze inward, to home and self, making work that engages with beauty and the culture of narcissism. The Zavros lifestyle is depicted and documented in his art. He paints what he appears to have become – a poster boy for a life perfected. He lives an outwardly perfect life, perfectly groomed for lifestyle magazines and shared through social media – he has 95,000 followers on Instagram. Zavros’s artworks present at first glance as perfectly rendered photo-realist painting, but they generate readings and responses beyond the surface affect. They underscore contemporary society’s obsession with beauty and vanity. Like advertising, what is being created in a Zavros painting is not so much an object, a type of physical thing, but rather an artificial need or desire. “It is part of the function of narcissism — the aim of narcissism,” writes psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, “to expose by provocation the narcissism of those with whom it comes into contact.” Our presentation at Sydney Contemporary will include a new large-scale painting of his daughter Phoebe, which is quite unlike earlier portraits in his ongoing Phoebe series, and a new still life painting.

Len Lye, Rotating Harmonic, 1959, steel rod, motor, copper and wooden base, 2200x 472 x 472 mm, Len Lye Collection/Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, image courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation.

Len Lye, Roundhead, 1961 (authorised reconstruction),steel, nylon, gold-plated copper with motor and ambient sound, Len Lye Collection/Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, image courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation.

Len Lye, Roundhead, 1961 (authorised reconstruction) (detail), steel, nylon, gold-plated copper with motor and ambient sound, Len Lye Collection/Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, image courtesy of the Len Lye Foundation.

Rebecca Baumann, Automated Colour Field (Variation 8), 2017, 140 clock and archival colour card, 1290 x 5030 x 90 mm, edition of 3 plus a/p. Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Photo: Maarten Holl

Rebecca Baumann, Automated Colour Field (Variation 8), 2017, (detail), 140 clock and archival colour card, 1290 x 5030 x 90 mm, edition of 3 plus a/p. Collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Photo: Maarten Holl

Seung Yul Oh, Horizontal Loop #1, 2017, acrylic on wood, 1000 x 900.

Seung Yul Oh, Horizontal Loop #6, 2017, acrylic on wood, 1000 x 900.

Seung Yul Oh, Horizontal Loop #4, 2017, acrylic on wood, 1200 x 800.

Michael Zavros, Amour, 2018, oil on canvas, 1700 x 1150 mm

Michael Zavros, Summer Fruits, 2017, oil on aluminium, 400 x 300 mm, private collection Melbourne

Michael Zavros, Vanilla Sundae, 2018, oil on canvas, 1000 x 1000 mm

Michael Zavros, Sundae, 2018, oil on canvas, 1000 x 1000 mm

Art Basel Hong Kong 2018

Michael Zavros — Sun, 11 Mar 2018 06:59:48 +0000

Starkwhite will present new work by Fiona Pardington (NZ) and Michael Zavros (AUS) at Art Basel Hong Kong 2018 in an exhibition titled Beyond Surface Affect. Both artists produce strikingly beautiful artworks – Pardington with her large-format photographs and Zavros with his trademark photo-realist paintings – where something on the surface is the source of something incomparably larger. The two complementary bodies of work, with their surfaces of excessive perfectionism, will operate as a meditation on the fluctuating relationship between outward appearance and the conveyance of ideas and emotions.

Fiona Pardington has made it part of her practice to reanimate dead material she finds near her home or in museums around the world: birds, mushrooms, plaster life casts of Maori heads, fragments of archival handwriting. She interrogates death and celebrates collecting and preservation.

The new work for Art Basel Hong Kong comes from her ongoing project, Nabokov’s Blues: The Charmed Circle.

As a famous novelist of his time, Vladimir Nabokov often featured on the cover of or inside Time, Life, Vogue, and the like, catching butterflies—and so became also the most famous lepidopterist of his time. Most assumed he was just a hobbyist, although a few specialists realized he was a world-class scientist, as has been borne out in research, books, and exhibitions from the 1980s to the 2010s.

A Nabokov lover since her teens, Pardington was stunned to read in 2011 how science had vindicated his hunches about the populating of the Americas by the Blues he specialized in. To pay homage, she has photographed, in European and American museums, only butterflies Nabokov caught and killed, words or diagrams in his hand, butterfly images on printed pages he marked: “The butterflies must be his own, their thorax crushed by the fingers that held the pen with which he wrote. Butterflies taken, like relics. One degree of separation. Love and death fold together.”

Her photographs disclose the beauty and strangeness of what he could see in “the charmed circle of the microscope”.

Pardington’s work springs from a strong Māori knowledge base, evident in the relationship it establishes with the forces and objects of the natural world through concepts of kaitiakitanga (guardianship) and mauri (spirit) – the very values Pardington sees reflected back in Nabokov’s relationship with his butterflies.

Both artists revel in the power and beauty of natural forms, teasing out the delicate relationships that exist between nature and culture and the forms of knowledge and practices that preserve or threaten these relationships.

Michael Zavros paints beautiful things beautifully. His subjects include European palaces, gardens and follies; up-market men’s fashion, flowers, luxury cars and jewellery; Lipizzaner dressage horses and Japanese pedigree onagadori chickens.

Increasingly the artist is turning his gaze inward, to home and self, making work that engages with beauty and the culture of narcissism. The Zavros lifestyle is depicted and documented in his art. He paints what he appears to have become – a poster boy for a life perfected. He lives an outwardly perfect life, perfectly groomed for lifestyle magazines and shared through social media – he has 95,000 followers on Instagram.

Zavros’s artworks present at first glance as perfectly rendered photo-realist painting, but they generate readings and responses beyond the surface affect. They underscore contemporary society’s obsession with beauty and vanity. Like advertising, what is being created in a Zavros painting is not so much an object, a type of physical thing, but rather an artificial need or desire. “It is part of the function of narcissism — the aim of narcissism,” writes psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, “to expose by provocation the narcissism of those with whom it comes into contact.”

Fiona Pardington Eros, from Nabokov’s copy of W.J. Holland, The Butterfly Book, I 2016. With thanks New York Public Library.

Fiona Pardington Polyommatus eros Och. Wing scales 1, 2016. From the Nabokov’s Blues: The Charmed Circle series. With thanks Musée Cantonal de Zoologie, Lausanne, Switzerland

Fiona Pardington Polyommatus eros Och, glassine I 2016. From the Nabokov’s Blues: The Charmed Circle series. With thanks Cornell University Insect Collection, Department of Entomology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

Fiona Pardington Scribbled out wing scale study 2016. From the Nabokov’s Blues: The Charmed Circle series. With thanks New York Public Library.

Fiona Pardington Pterourus rutulus, (Western Tiger Swallowtail), glassine 2016. From the Nabokov’s Blues: The Charmed Circle series 2016. With thanks Cornell University Insect Collection, Department of Entomology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Fiona Pardington Aphrodite I, from Nabokov’s copy of W.J. Holland, The Butterfly Book 2016. With thanks New York Public Library

Fiona Pardington Nabokov Oak Creek Sulphur, glassine I 2016. From the Nabokov’s Blues: The Charmed Circle series. With thanks Cornell University Insect Collection, Department of Entomology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Michael Zavros, Narcissus, 2016, oil on board, 30.5 x 30.5 cm

Michael Zavros, Zeus/Zavros, 2018, oil on board, 105 x 150 cm

Michael Zavros, MZ/SO, 2015-17, pigment inks on Hanhenmuhle Photo Rag, 120 x 90 cm

Michael Zavros, Boy with Lemon, 2018, oil on board, 41 x30.5 cm

Michael Zavros, Portrait of Leonidas Zavros in Versace, 2018, oil on canvas, 122 x 92 cm

Michael Zavros, The Happy Couple, 2017, oil on board, 24 x 18 cm

Michael Zavros, Girl with Oranges, 2017, oil on board, 30.5 x 41 cm

The Silver Fox at Starkwhite, Auckland

Michael Zavros — Sat, 11 Nov 2017 08:29:27 +0000

Michael Zavros | The Silver Fox

17 November –16 December, 2017

Increasingly Michael Zavros is turning his gaze inward, to home and self, depicting and documenting the Zavros lifestyle in his work. He paints what he appears to have become – a poster boy for a life perfected. He lives an outwardly perfect life, perfectly groomed for lifestyle magazines and shared through social media (he has 99,500 followers on Instagram).

Zavros’s artworks present at first glance as perfectly rendered photo-realist painting, but they generate readings and responses beyond the surface affect. They underscore contemporary society’s obsession with beauty and vanity. As writer Laurence Simmons says: “Like advertising, what is being created in a Zavros painting is not so much an object, a type of physical thing, but rather an artificial need or desire.”

Viewed collectively The Silver Fox offers something of a family portrait, albeit a non-conventional one. The exhibition hinges on the tension between truths and fictions. In his essay in the book Michael Zavros (published by Manuscript, 2017), Simmons makes an analogy with the great Renaissance chronicler Giorgio Vasari whose famous tome The Lives of Artists melded fact and fiction. Whether by design or fate Zavros’s own (brief) history has become the stuff of fictionalised legend – that he paints only in suits, that he lives a life of unrestrained glamour, that his Instagram depicts his best life. The Silver Fox plays with the veracity of the image and the life, his life, that it depicts.

In the exhibition we see the artist’s son Leo posing in a rainbow wig. In another work he is lip-synching in film as a film clip for Ariana Grande. A film clip in his head.

We see his middle child Olympia contorting herself in a gymnastic pose on a zebra skin. Like Leo, she is acting – or as Zavros would have it, this is role-play in Dad’s curious fiction.

The kitten is a depiction of a pre teen model and her kitten. This is the artist’s eldest daughter Phoebe, the subject of many earlier Zavros ‘self portraits’. This painting sits alongside a self-portrait of the artist (complete with artist’s moniker) as played by supermodel Sean O’Pry; Zavros as his best imagined self.

In Walters/Zavros we see a stylish arrangement of two beautiful things – an ionic column juxtaposed with a famous koru painting by Gordon Walters. Zavros evokes the cultural politics of New Zealand in the 90s (the controversial appropriation debates), but having prompted them, he moves on leaving us with a beautifully rendered fictional interior located within his wider project, highlighting the way his paintings operate as objects of desire for collectors.

The Happy Couple depicts the late JFK junior and his wife Carolyn Bessette as avatars for the artist and his wife. The tragedy of their untimely end is forgotten in the media glare of this perfect moment, where briefly they seem the very definition of happiness. The painting expunges the truths we know about the famous coupling and asks us to re-imagine them as them.

And what of The Silver Fox, a collection of lavender and grey blooms in a silver vase with a fox tail? Is it a creature of mythical elusiveness or the artist himself? Older and wiser. Unseen and unknowable.

These images of self as mediated through his family (and others) offer a glimpse of the artist and his preoccupations through an inward looking lens. They also present as a continuation of his exploration of beauty as a power, a contemporary currency revered above all else.

BIO

Born in Brisbane in 1974, Michael Zavros is a leading Australian artist. His work has been exhibited in major museums and galleries throughout Australia, the United States, New Zealand, Asia and Europe. He graduated from Queensland College of Art, Griffith University with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 1996.

In 2012 Zavros was awarded the inaugural Bulgari Art Award through the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 2016 he won the Mosman Art Prize and in 2010 he was awarded the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the world’s richest prize for portraiture. He has won three major Australian drawing prizes: the 2002 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award, the 2005 Robert Jacks Drawing Prize and the 2007 Kedumba Drawing Award. He has been a multiple Archibald Prize finalist and was the recipient of the 2004 MCA Primavera Collex Art Award.

Major exhibitions include Surface Affect at Govett Brewster Gallery, New Zealand, 2017, Selectively Revealed, an Asialink and Experimenta Media Arts touring exhibition 2012, and Uncanny (the unnaturally strange), Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand 2007, the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art 2016, Art Gallery of South Australia, GOMA Q at Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2015, Wilderness at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2010, Scott Redford Vs Michael Zavros at the Institute of Modern Art, 2010, Contemporary Australia: Optimism at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2008, and Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2000.

Zavros was the subject of a major survey exhibition, Magic Mike in 2017 at Newcastle Art Gallery. Other solo exhibitions include Bad Dad at Starkwhite, Auckland, 2014, A Private Collection: Artist Choice, Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, The Prince, Rockhampton Art Gallery and Griffith University Art Gallery, The Good Son: Works on Paper, a survey exhibition at Gold Coast City Art Gallery, 2009, Everything I wanted at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane 2003, and solo exhibitions at Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2016 and Art Basel Hong Kong 2015 with Starkwhite, New Zealand.

Zavros has been the recipient of several international residencies including a 2017 residency at PACC in Shanghai, the Australia Council Greene Street Studio, New York in 2015, and the Australia Council Barcelona studio in both 2005 and 2010, and the Australia Council Milan studio residency in 2001. In 2003 he was awarded a Cite International des Arts Residency in Paris through the Power Institute, University of Sydney. In 2004 he was awarded a studio residency at the Gunnery Studios, Sydney, from the NSW Ministry for the Arts.

In 2016 he was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery of Australia to paint Dame Quentin Bryce, and in 2013 by the Australian War Memorial to paint a portrait of Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith.

Michael Zavros served on the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts between 2007 and 2011 and currently serves on the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) board, and the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University Advisory Committee.

His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including The National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, University of Queensland Art Museum, Artbank, National Portrait Gallery, Griffith University Art Collection, Newcastle Region Art Gallery and Tasmanian Museum and Gallery.

Michael Zavros, The Silver Fox, 2017, installation view

Michael Zavros, Feat. Leo Zavros, 2017 (video still), digital video, edition of 5 plus a/p

Michael Zavros, MZ/SO, 2015, archival ink on Hahnemuhle photo rag, 1200 x 900 mm, edition of 5

Michael Zavros, The Silver Fox, 2017, installation view

Michael Zavros, Leo is Six, 2017, oil on board, 300 x 300 mm

Michael Zavros, Bridge, 2017, oil on board, 458 x 610 mm

Michael Zavros, The Kitten, 2016, oil on aluminum, 400 x 275 mm

Michael Zavros, The Silver Fox, 2017, installation view

Michael Zavros, The Happy Couple, 2017, oil on board, 240 x 180 mm

Michael Zavros, The Silver Fox, 2017, installation view

Michael Zavros, The Silver Fox, 2017, oil on canvas, 900 x 700 mm

Michael Zavros, Walters/Zavros, 2017, oil on canvas, 1700 x 1700 mm

Michael Zavros, a new book published by Manuscript in association with Starkwhite and Philip Bacon Galleries. Also available in a clamshell case and as a limited edition with a Zavros etching.

Surface Affect opens at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

Michael Zavros — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 07:07:19 +0000

Surface Affect: Amanda Gruenwald, Jeena Shin, Michael Zavros

Surface Affect presents the work of three painters working with concepts of the surface, and the surface of their pictures, in different ways.

Sydney Contemporary 2017

Michael Zavros — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 06:46:13 +0000

Starkwhite will present a two-person exhibition by Fiona Pardington (NZ) and Michael Zavros (AUS) at this year’s edition of Sydney Contemporary. The fair runs from 7 – 10 September with a by-invitation VIP preview on 6 September.

Pardington presents four new works, two of which are a part of her recent body of work Nabokov’s Blues: The Charmed Circle, which debuted at the Honolulu Biennial earlier this year. Though more well-known for his novels, Vladimir Nabokov was also a renowned lepidopterist. Granted special access to the butterflies he caught and killed, Pardington travelled to Europe and America to meticulously document the blue-winged specimens. The photographs capture the strangeness and beauty of the creatures that captivated Nabokov. In keeping with her fascination for creatures of flight, the other two works are executed using a new photo montage technique to combine images of the extinct New Zealand huia wattlebird and her children.

Pardington’s new works are accompanied by recent and earlier photographs selected to represent her larger project – conserving our lost histories, breathing life back into museum archives and embedding new stories into the subjects at the same time.

Fiona Pardington bio

Pardington (b. Cameron 1961) is of Māori (Ngāi Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Ngāti Kahungunu); Scottish (Clan Cameron of Erracht); MacDonald and O’Niell descent. Her photography explores themes of memory, time, history, photographer and subject. By photographing taonga Māori (historical treasures), nature specimens and other museum artefacts, she revives their human and spiritual contexts, uniting postcolonial politics and reparative aesthetics.

Pardington has a Doctorate in Fine Arts from Auckland University and has received several laureates, fellowships, residencies, awards and grants. She was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by France in 2016 and a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2017.

In 2015 she was honoured with a 30 year survey exhibition which toured museums in three New Zealand cities. Her work has been included in many important international group exhibitions and biennials including the Kiev Biennial, Ukraine, 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia, and is held in all significant Australasian public collections, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, and the National Gallery of Canada. Her most recent work explored novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s butterfly collecting and appeared in the 1st Honolulu Biennial in 2017.

Michael Zavros bio

Michael Zavros was born in Brisbane in 1974. He graduated from Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, with a Bachelor of Visual Arts, in 1996. His work has been exhibited throughout Australia, New Zealand, Asia, the United States and Europe.

He won the Mosman Art Prize in 2016, the inaugural Bulgari Art Award in 2012, the Doug Moran Moran National Portrait Prize (the world’s richest portraiture prize) in 2010, and MCA Primavera Collex Art Award in 2004. He has won three major drawing prizes: Kedumba Drawing Award in 2007, Robert Jacks Drawing Prize in 2005, and Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award in 2002. He has been an Archibald Prize finalist on several occasions.

He had a survey exhibition, Magic Mike, Newcastle Art Gallery, 2017. Other solo shows include Bad Dad, Starkwhite, Auckland, 2014; The Prince, Rockhampton Art Gallery and Griffith University Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2013; The Good Son: Works on Paper, Gold Coast City Art Gallery, 2009; and Everything I Wanted, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2013. Through Starkwhite, he has had solo presentations at Art Los Angeles Contemporary, 2016, and Art Basel Hong Kong, 2015.

His group exhibitions include Surface Affect, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2017; Selectively Revealed, an Asialink and Experimenta Media Arts touring exhibition, 2012; Uncanny (The Unnaturally Strange), Artspace, Auckland, 2007; 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2016; GOMA Q, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2015; Wilderness, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2010; Scott Redford Vs. Michael Zavros, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2010; Contemporary Australia: Optimism, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2008; and Primavera, 2000, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Zavros has enjoyed residencies: PACC, Shanghai, 2017; Australia Council Greene Street Studio, New York, 2015; Australia Council Barcelona Studio, 2010 and 2005; Gunnery Studios, Sydney (through Ministry for the Arts, NSW), 2004; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (through Power Institute, University of Sydney), 2003; and Australia Council Milan Studio, 2001.

In 2016 he was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint Dame Quentin Bryce, and in 2013 by the Australian War Memorial to paint Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith.

He serves on the National Association for the Visual Arts’ Board and the Queensland College of Art’s Advisory Committee. Between 2007 and 2011, he was a member of the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Board.

His work is held in numerous Australian public collections, including Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Artbank, Sydney; Griffith University Art Collection, Brisbane; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Newcastle Art Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; and University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane.

Fiona Pardington
Jack Rahi, Nina Marie and the Huia, 2017
pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, 160 x 106 cm each work (diptych)
With thanks to Te Manawa Museum, New Zealand

Fiona Pardington
Huia Beak Brooch, Te Manawa Museum, 2017
pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, 825 x 1100 mm
With thanks to Te Manawa Museum, New Zealand

Fiona Pardington
Moonlight de Sade, 2010
pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, size variable
With thanks to the Musee de l’Home, Paris

Fiona Pardington
Lycaeides Melissa wing scales, 2, 2016. From the series Nabokov’s Blues: The Charmed Circle
pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, size variable
With thanks Musee Cantonal de Zoologie, Lausanne, Switzerland

Fiona Pardington
Lampides boeticus, wing scales 1, 2017 from the series Nabokov’s Blues: The Charmed Circle
pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, size variable
With thanks to the Musee Cantonal de Zoologie, Lausanne, Switzerland

Fiona Pardington
White_Light_Unicorn, 2016
pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, size variable

Fiona Pardington
Sanguine_Unicorn, 2016
pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, size variable

Fiona Pardington
Still Life with Waterlilies, Dragon Fruit and Sphinx, Ripiro 2014 pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag
size variable

Fiona Pardington
A Portrait of a life-cast of Kakaley (painted), Solomon Islands, 2010
pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, size variable
With thanks to the Musee de l’Home, Paris

Michael Zavros
White Peacock, 2017
oil on canvas, 220 x 200 cm

Michael Zavros
Skeleton flex, 2017
oil on canvas, 135 x 180 cm

Michael Zavros
Skull with Hydrangea, 2017
oil on canvas, 80 x 105 cm

Michael Zavros
Phoebe is 11/Swan, 2017
oil on board, 40 x 30.5 cm

Michael Zavros
Phoebe is 11/Linda Farrow, 2017
oil on board, 22.2 x 22.2 cm

Michael Zavros
Sunbather, 2017
oil on aluminium, 20 x 40 cm

Michael Zavros
Marge Simpson, 2017
oil on canvas, 140 x 110 cm

Magic Mike opens at Newcastle Art Gallery

Michael Zavros — Sat, 11 Mar 2017 01:20:40 +0000

The survey exhibition brings together work from the past two decades of Zavros’ practice and features a gymnasium installation activated with live performers http://nag.org.au/Exhibitions/Current/Archives/2017/MAGIC-MIKE

This exhibition features a gymnasium installation activated with live performers.

MAGIC MIKE articulates the artist Michael Zavros’ interest in exploring the idea of the body beautiful in art and concepts of male beauty. In part Zavros’ art practice underscores contemporary society’s obsession with beauty and vanity, which he exposes as age old preoccupations, as much as it offers an autobiographical account.

The exhibition title playfully references virtuoso painting and ‘magic’ realism but also is a parody of the film of the same name, the 2012 American comedic drama directed by Steven Soderbergh about a troupe of male strippers. The lead role played by Channing Tatum is to Zavros the pop culture contemporary equivalent of an ancient Adonis; the male form perfected.

Newcastle Art Gallery has collaborated with Zavros as exhibition artist and co-curator to re-contextualize his earlier art practice alongside more recent and new works developed specifically for Magic Mike. Works of art recently acquired by Newcastle Art Gallery include The Sunbather 2015 and The Mermaid 2015 shown in this exhibition for the first time.

The Sunbather 2015 pays homage to the work of David Hockney and expands on Zavros’s ongoing exploration of the myth of narcissus depicting the artist beside his swimming pool. The Mermaid 2015 also uses the artist’s home pool as its setting capturing his daughter Phoebe floating with her hair spooling out on the surface of the water. These images of self and the self as mediated through his daughter offer a glimpse of the artist through an inward looking lens. They are important pieces in the artist’s oeuvre and representative of two dominating threads in his practice.

A Million Dollars at Philip Bacon Gallery

Michael Zavros — Fri, 11 Nov 2016 08:39:38 +0000

A million dollars will be Michael Zavros’s first exhibition in three years in Queensland. Born in 1974, the artist is a graduate of Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, working across painting, drawing, photography, sculpture and film.

He has exhibited widely within Australia and internationally and his work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Queensland Art Gallery, Australian National Portrait Gallery and Tasmanian Museum and Gallery. Zavros has been the recipient of several international residencies, grants and numerous prestigious prizes including the 2002 Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award, the 2005 Robert Jacks Drawing Prize, the 2007 Kedumba Drawing Award and the 2004 MCA Primavera Collex Art Award.

In 2010 he won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize for his portrait of his eldest daughter, then 5, Phoebe is dead/ Alexander McQueen. In 2012 he was the recipient of the inaugural Bulgari Art Award, awarded through the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the beneficiaries of his painting entitled The Round Room.

Earlier this year Zavros held his first solo exhibition in the United States at Art Los Angeles Contemporary with Starkwhite, Auckland, which was followed by his inclusion in the Adelaide Biennial entitled Magic Objectat Art Gallery of South Australia. Last month QAGOMA chose his self portrait Bad dadfor their 2016 Foundation acquisition. Modelled from carefully constructed photo shoots staged in the family swimming pool, Bad daddepicts Zavros draped across pool toys. A contemporary appropriation of a Carravaggio painting of Narcisssus, Bad dadis the first work by a contemporary Queensland artist to be the sole focus of a Foundation Appeal. QAGOMA Director Chris Saines said, ‘The acquisition of Michael Zavros’s intriguing and technically faultless painting strengthens our holding of 11 works by this outstanding artist and our collection of contemporary Australian art.’

A million dollarsdraws together current threads in the artist’s practice and illuminates some key ideas around the premise that art should project a moral truth. Zavros has commented, “Art holds fast to the idea that it is relevant, important and enduring. I find this lofty self-importance tedious, and yet I am complicit with it”. Within Zavros’ intricately painted still life works of flowers arranged to suggest the shape of their titles, there is a dialogue with the art historical tradition of memento moriand vanitaspainting. The works function as elaborate follies; bunches of luxurious blooms that whither before the artist can paint them; the passing of time and the fading of youth. In fashioning them into some semblance of a form Zavros imbues these blooms with wit and humour, and an enduring gravitas.

The exhibition catalogue cover features a curious still life painting entitled Great white. White roses, tulips, November lilies, orchids and gladioli are assembled in a precarious baroque triangle, painted with the artist’s signature precision. The title alludes to a shark, sluicing through an ocean of dark commodification, doubled with a sinister shadow.Striking in its simplicity, Toucanemploys a single palm frond and a ranunculus to suggest the exotic bird; Jellyfish depicts a gigantic Waterford ruby crystal bowl filled with hyacinth and inverted to suggest a ponderous jelly. The new paintings all exhibit the artist’s characteristic attention to detail, while the title offers a double entendre with its platitudinous reference to the works looking ‘a million dollars’ at the same time that it slyly suggests the sum commercial value of the works on exhibit. Zavros has long made work about art as a consumer trophy, the bounty of the 1%, and here he confounds the viewer with his intentions.

Art critic John McDonald observed “Michael Zavros is one of the great boom artists in Australia today. He knows that technical skills are not enough. His intellectually challenging work has a twist that holds the viewer.” Nick Mitzevich, Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, which recently acquired Zavros’s The Phoenix, a key work in the 2016 Adelaide Biennial, said, ”Even the title (of The Phoenix) could be read as a reference to the rebirth of painting from the ashes of the digital world.” The Phoenix, on exhibition as part of A million dollars, depicts the mythic bird assembled from flowers and silver pieces from AGSA’s extensive decorative arts collection.

A million dollarsalso includes a series of works, drawings and paintings, from Zavros’s ongoing project about his daughter Phoebe, whom he has been drawing, painting, photographing and filming almost since she was born. In August Zavros won the Mosman Art Prize with a new painting of Phoebe entitled Flora. He reflects “She (Phoebe) is my muse, but also a surrogate me. In some ways, my portraits of her function as self-portraits: me outside of myself.”

In November a portrait of Dame Quentin Bryce, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery will be unveiled. In March 2017 a major solo exhibition survey calledMagic Mikewill open at Newcastle Art Gallery.

Art Gallery of South Australia acquire major new work

Michael Zavros — Sun, 15 May 2016 22:29:45 +0000

Following it’s inclusion in the 2016 Adelaide Biennial: Magic Object, the Art Gallery of South Australia have acquired Zavro’s The Phoenix

Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art – Magic Object opens

Michael Zavros — Sat, 27 Feb 2016 06:05:14 +0000

Curated by Lisa Slade and featuring 25 artists across 4 venues, the exhibition contains six of Zavros’ paintings including The Phoenix and a temporary installation The Twins

Art Los Angeles Contemporary

Michael Zavros — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 06:08:15 +0000

Starkwhite, Auckland presents a solo exhibition of Zavros’ work at Art Los Angeles Contemporary. The show features new paintings and Zavros’ 2010 film We Dance In The Studio (to that shit on the radio)

Sydney Contemporary 2015

Michael Zavros — Thu, 10 Sep 2015 07:13:36 +0000

Starkwhite , Auckland present a group exhibition for Sydney Contemporary 2015

GOMAQ opens at Gallery of Modern Art

Michael Zavros — Sat, 11 Jul 2015 06:09:56 +0000

GOMAQ profiles more than 30 emerging, mid-career and senior artists working across the spectrum of themes and media and reflects the dynamic character of Queensland art today.

Starkwhite present Zavros solo exhibition at Art Basel Hong Kong, 2015

Michael Zavros — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 11:42:59 +0000

Starkwhite, Auckland present a solo exhibition of Zavros’ work at Art Basel Hong Kong. The exhibition contains new paintings and photographs together with key works from the artist’s personal collection.

NGA Contemporary opens

Michael Zavros — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 21:19:04 +0000

The National Gallery of Australia unveils a new gallery space with an inaugural exhibition NGA Contemporary highlighting Australia’s leading contemporary artists from the gallery’s collection. The exhibition features The Lioness, 2010, oil on canvas.