If you’re looking for an indoors activity in Brisbane, why not check out one of these irresistible new exhibitions at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art.
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Queensland Gallery of Modern Art has collectively titled them Irresistible. The first is a 25-year survey of work by contemporary Queensland artist Michael Zavros, called The Favourite, and it just so happens he’s my husband. With that out of the way, the show covers his multidisciplinary practice, traversing drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and video. It brings together more than 90 works, from his early miniature paintings, inspired by luxury advertisements in men’s magazines, to recent still-life works that imagine fantastical creatures confected from fruit and flowers, silk scarfs, seashells and vases on white canvases.
Zavros’s work is characterised by its attention to detail, meticulous painting and subjects ranging from equine specimens, which hark back to his childhood show-jumping that the title The Favourite alludes to, to rare Japanese Onagadori chickens that potentially hold the key to ageing in their impossibly long tails, which grow for the life of the bird.
Love’s Temple (2006) by Michael Zavros. Picture: Supplied. © Michael Zavros
Studies of European palaces and gardens speak to melancholy, and an ongoing series of works based on his (our!) children dial into the experience of fatherhood as mediated by a life in art; these works are a meditation on mortality. The thread that binds them all is a fascination with beauty, its transience, and the tension between life and death, desire and love.
A highlight is a new work, a sculptural installation called Drowned Mercedes (2023). It is in fact a real car, a classic 1990s Mercedes-Benz S convertible entirely filled with water. It’s a folly, a monument to ambition and futility, but also a nightmare made real. Peering into the car, viewers see themselves reflected, like Narcissus, a theme Zavros regularly refers to in works such as Bad Dad.
Then there’s a gigantic wall painting of the Parthenon that brings something of the European summer to our winter. Acropolis Now (2023)will be backdrop to a Greek coffee house (or kafenio) once a month, activated by members of Brisbane’s Greek community playing backgammon, drinking Greek coffee and inviting exhibition visitors to join them. It’s Zavros’s commentary on the much-contested repatriation of the Parthenon marbles, a hot topic as pressure mounts on the British Museum to return the friezes and metopes stolen by Lord Elgin.
For one admission price audiences can experience The Favourite alongside Beautiful Wickedness, a retrospective of more than 100 works by Canberra-based artist and tattooist eX de Medici. More on that in another column soon.
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