Michael zavros horse
- •
Michael Zavros
Michael Zavros (b. 1974) graduated from Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 1996. Since graduating, he has worked as a sessional lecturer in painting and printmaking at the same institution. He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions including Primavera 2000 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Associazione ViaFarini (2003) in Milan and Uncanny (the unnaturally strange) (2005) in Auckland. His solo exhibitions include Everything I wanted (2003-2004) at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and The Loved One (2003) at Sydney's Mori Gallery in 2003. Over the past five years Zavros has received many awards, grants and prizes. In 2001 he held the Australia Council Visual Arts/Craft Fund Milan Residency. The following year he won the Jacaranda Acquisitive Drawing Award. In 2003 he was awarded a Cite International des Arts Residency in Paris through the Power Institute, University of Sydney. In 2004 he was granted a residency at the Gunnery Studios, Sydney, from the NSW Ministry for the Arts and received the Primavera Collex Art Award t
- •
Michael Zavros
Michael Zavros (b.1974) is a leading Australian artist. His work has been exhibited in major museums throughout Australia, New Zealand, Asia and Europe.
Michael Zavros graduated from Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Visual Arts in 1996.
In 2016 Zavros was awarded the Mosman Art Prize and in 2012 he won the inaugural Bulgari Art Award through the Art Gallery of New South Wales. 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, and has been a multiple Archibald Prize finalist. He was the recipient of the 2004 MCA Primavera Collex Art Award.
In 2023 Queensland Art gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) staged a retrospective of Zavros’ work. Both Dunedin Public Art Gallery and City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand will stage solo exhibitions in 24/25. In 2019 Starkwhite presented a two person exhibition with Billy Apple and Zavros at Art Lo
- •
Michael Zavros is a leading Australian painter based in Brisbane who works in a photorealistic style. A virtuoso of material illusionism, he creates seductive still life tableaux that comment on collecting, value systems and art history.
The Phoenix combines painted floral arrangements that the artist designs, photographs and paints with decorative and design objects to create zoomorphic creatures against stark white backdrops. The Phoenix is suggestive of the symbolic bird rising in flight, but in Zavros's painting, its fanned wings are formed of palm leaves; its neck and beak a silver sporting trophy cup; its skeleton a gilded dessert stand; and its ruffled feathers replaced with explosive plumes of colourful flowers. These objects shift symbolically and Zavros's phoenix seems more like a soaring tropical bird.
Zavros created this painting for the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Magic Object exhibition. He responded to the Australian and European Decorative Arts and Design collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia. The two objects depicted are
Copyright ©soybeck.pages.dev 2025