The Phoenix

Based in Brisbane, Michael Zavros is a leading Australian painter who works in a photorealistic style. A virtuoso of material illusionism, he creates seductive still life tableaux, which comment on collecting, value systems and art history.

The Phoenix combines painted floral arrangements – designed, photographed and painted by the artist himself – with decorative and design objects to create zoomorphic creatures, with these presented against stark white backdrops. Although the work overall is suggestive of the mythical phoenix rising in flight, in Zavros’s painting, its fanned wings are formed of palm leaves; its neck and beak are a silver sporting trophy cup; its skeleton a gilded dessert stand; and its ruffled feathers have been replaced by explosive plumes of colourful flowers. These objects shift symbolically and Zavros’s phoenix seems more like a soaring tropical bird.

When Zavros created this painting for the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Magic Object exhibition, he was responding 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 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 in this display.