Five-year-old Phoebe lies on the floor covered in an Alexander McQueen scarf, playing dead.
Children playing dead is nothing unusual, but to her father Australian artist Michael Zavros it was too good of an image not to capture, given McQueen had died earlier that year.
Others agreed. The portrait, titled Phoebe is Dead/McQueen, went on to win the 2010 $150,000 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize — the world’s richest prize for portraiture. But for some it was seen as confronting.
"It became quite a controversial work and it kind of hit at a time when we were in this morality crisis and there was this hypersensitivity about the way children are presented in art."
Another reason for its significance and inclusion in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s "Meet the Zavros’s" survey exhibition is that it "kicked off" a series of work between Zavros and his daughter that has become central to his practice.
Zavros found his daughter to be a natural in front of the camera. In a moving image work he captures Phoebe dancing to Lady Gaga, something she did after school every day for a few weeks.
"She would do very grown up things for the camera and I found that really confronting as a dad but really fascinating as an artist and those two sort of things formed a tension in the work that has been a little bit provocative.
The exhibition also includes his latest work featuring Phoebe, now aged 20, in an evening gown on a plush sofa. It is a reference to portrait painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and the society painters of centuries past.
"They were often portraying young women coming out of balls in great swathes of satin. At one point Phoebe tried on my wife Alison's wedding dress and came out looking amazing, as she always does, but it's a very confronting thing having this 16-year-old wearing this wedding dress and looking amazing and so of course I had to make work about it."
His next daughter Olympia also features in a photograph Homework in the backseat of a Rolls-Royce doing her homework with her older sister. But she was never comfortable in front of the camera while their younger brother Leo is more like his oldest sister when it comes to the camera.
"He's quite good at it as well, but a less co-operative model. I've got about a five-minute window."
The children are now older and Phoebe is less sure about the fame her father’s work has brought her. Having Phoebe is Dead/McQueen discussed in her art class at school as it is part of the curriculum was quite confronting for her.
"In some ways this body of work has brought us together because we've done lots and lots of projects together and at some point she started to collaborate and direct the work a lot more and in other ways it's brought tension to our relationship."
These days she is reluctant to be in the works.
"She’s not sure how she feels about some of the work and I think that is par for the course. We discuss these things."
"It's an extension of this very public presentation of my life or our family life. These paintings of the kids as hunting trophies on the wall and the show is called Meet the Zavros’s which is meet the family as much as it is meet the works. So I wanted to play with that idea of the kids, literally in the exhibition as these trophies."
He sees it as similar to the taxidermy that is featured in some of his other works which plays on the idea of the artist as a hunting trophy, as a collectable trophy.
"Casting kids, or casting humans in that role is confronting. They’re quite creepy things to look at."
While his family is central to his work, Zavros has not forgotten himself. A lot of his work has involved self-portraiture — painting himself in the pool or with his car — but five years ago he made a plastic mannequin version of himself that he could use as a stand-in.
"He was sort of a better version of me, a bigger, leaner, younger version of me. I was kind of interested in that idea of these different projections of ourselves and also just not necessarily connecting with this version of myself that I would constantly see in the media."
It enabled him to create a surrogate blank canvas to project ideas on to because mannequins often have a blank expression.
"I mean he's quite funny. And he's kind of sad."
Called "Dad" he has taken him on holiday and placed him in everyday situations like visiting his horse Thomas — Zavros is a keen horse rider — or taking his car for a drive.
His love of horses has also translated into his work with a series of horse sculptures.
"I love horses. This goes on the wall a bit like a hunting trophy as well. This one's called Winning is Easy. He's blinded. He's feted and fated."
But it is painting that is Zavros’ first love. He started drawing whatever was in front of him when he was a child and so his parents took him to lessons.
"At a really early, like primary school, I was always painting, it just was my life."
He went on to art school and then describes a lucky break getting media coverage of a mural he had painted. "Suddenly I had this business and that allowed me to do my own work in the meantime and start exhibiting that."
The commercial market for his realism work continued to allow him to make his own work. In more recent years he has experimented with still life painting. One in the exhibition is a couple of vases of flowers shaped like a dinosaur.
"I'll do an arrangement that looks like a dog or a bird or something. It plays with this idea about being a realist painter I guess. Like what do you believe? Is this a dog or is this a bunch of flowers? It's kind of a mocking gesture."
It can be challenging creating these sort of still lifes in the heat of Queensland but he takes lots of photographs to use as a reference.
His love of realism also led him to create sculptures which enable him to create something in the round. They are bronze made from Plasticine models he sculpts and are then cast in a foundry, a lost wax method which has not changed in thousands of years.
"I guess creating something with my fingers I really enjoy. Plasticine is really easy, you can add and subtract, it never dries out like clay."
While Zavros sometimes has assistants helping him with his creations, he enjoys the solo pursuit of making in his home studio.
"I mean I like time by myself, just making something. I really love that. Even just being in Queenstown recently, I'd sit down and I'd draw a tree and it just helps me connect with the world and centres me a bit."
Looking around the exhibition at the works which span 30 years of his career is an interesting feeling, he says.
"I look at a lot of the work and I remember so much of what was happening in my life at that time. Obviously because this show features my family, it features my kids. You can literally see them growing up. So it's nice to see the little people that once were. That's great."
TO SEE
Meet the Zavros's, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, November 15 2025- April 6 2026; Artist talk, November 15, 11am-noon.
