The Phoenix

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 the 1870s Henry Steiner Adelaide Hunt Club Cup and the neoclassical dessert stand designed by John Flaxman and made by silversmith Paul Storr in Britain in 1812–13, the latter which is featured here in the display.

Leigh Robb, Curator of Contemporary Art