The first thing you see when you enter artist Michael Zavros’s latest exhibition at Dunedin’s Public Art Gallery – right under his name – is a stuffed peacock. Proud. Beautiful. Preserved for all to gaze upon. But it’s a little disconcerting when beyond it – in an exhibition titled Meet the Zavros’s – are the portraits and self-portraits you might expect in such a show, only with the added, unnerving presence of a mannequin of Zavros himself in a series of carefully staged photos: taken by the “real” Zavros of the “pretend” Zavros with his own children.

In a video tour of the exhibition, Zavros explains the congruence. For one thing, he hasn’t suddenly taken up taxidermy – the peacock is a borrowed object from the gallery – and for another, it fits alongside his 3D-printed likeness into the main theme of this exhibition: the idea of the collectable trophy.

Lucy Hammonds, co-curator with Lauren Gutsell of this six-month showcase, sees Zavros’s first major exhibition in New Zealand as a way of introducing audiences to some of these central tensions in his work. “You can look at the peacock in different ways,” she says. “It’s a whimsical gesture sitting at the entrance, but it also has a lot of encoded meaning, particularly a sense of male vanity and showing off. It was also a symbol of immortality in some ancient cultures, based on the belief its flesh didn’t decay after death.”

Combine this with the idea that the “eyes” on the tail of the bird represent heaven and the yearly shedding of its feathers symbolises rebirth, renewal and the cycle of life and, she adds: “There’s a lot more to be yielded from the peacock than you might first imagine, which is always part of the beauty of Michael’s work.”

As part of his month-long residency at the gallery, Zavros, 51, has also created a new work, a pair of somewhat disturbing trompe-l’oeil paintings of two of his children’s heads. Olympia, 18, his second-eldest daughter, and Leo, 14, his son, hang limply from the wall, almost, dare I say it, as if they’ve been beheaded. Add to that the portrait of his then five-year-old daughter, Phoebe (now 20) in Phoebe is Dead/McQueen – which won him the highly coveted Moran Portrait prize in 2010 – not to mention his most recent exhibition at Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane entitled Things Fall Apart – and you could be forgiven for thinking that death and endings have been preying on the artist’s mind.

In his recent works, dying and decay is portrayed in numerous ways, for example, on a massive canvas as an Ionic column washed up on a beach against a cerulean blue sky, or as a skull sitting atop a vase with cascading grapes reminiscent of Louis XIV’s massive wigs (The Sunking), or as a poignant small oil painting of Tina, the family’s dead duck, balanced on a silver compote, a vase with autumnal leaves surrounding her. “She died of a leg infection,” Zavros says. “We noticed she had a cut on her leg, and a slight swelling, and we took her to the vet who put her on antibiotics. She seemed to get better, and then I went out one morning to feed the ducks, and she was dead.”

Zavros’s animal menagerie is important to him, and even as we chat in the family’s whitewashed, high-ceilinged, villa-style home on the outskirts of Brisbane the day before he leaves for New Zealand, a two-day-old gosling (it has since been named Sauron by Leo, who names all the family’s ducks and geese) squawks from inside a cardboard box, where it has everything it needs to keep it comfy. “It was born with slightly wonky legs,” Zavros tells me. “We’ve been keeping it inside to see if its legs will start to work properly.” He pops the little fluff-ball on the ground, and it tumbles over a few times before determinedly straightening itself up and following its new daddy into the kitchen. He smiles with pleasure. “It’s definitely getting better.”

But the problem with being an animal owner is, of course, that there are deaths, and the more animals, the more deaths. (Even as I wrote this story, while Zavros was away, Juno, the family cat, a beautiful Burmese, was run over and died.) On a larger scale, perhaps the problem with life is death, and the last few years has seen a lot of loss, two major ones being the death of his wife Alison Kubler’s father, and having to put to sleep Olympia’s beloved horse, Bono, a big old grey warmblood bought for his daughter when she showed no signs of growing out of the passion-for-horses phase.

“I found Bono’s death particularly hard to come to terms with,” Zavros says. “He had massive tumours in his neck, and I worried we kept him going too long, but also, I realised, as I stayed in this huge grief around losing him, that when Olympia got Bono and I bought myself Voss, a young warmblood, I’d created a circle, and come right back to the horse life I’d had to make a choice to leave behind when I went to art school. With Bono’s death, and Olympia in her last year of school, I was losing it all again, and within that loss, there were also echoes of my parents’ separation, and how that was the end of the horses.”

In the days of Zavros’s childhood, growing up in the Gold Coast hinterland with his four sisters, owning horses wasn’t as expensive as it is now. “My parents were both schoolteachers, and we didn’t have a lot of spare money,” Zavros says, “but they bought my sister a Shetland pony when I was about five, and that was it – horses became an all-consuming passion.”

Zavros competed in state teams for showjumping and eventing, and later, when his parents separated, got himself a job working at the Gold Coast Turf Club, where he became clerk of the course, a job which inevitably involved the occasional euthanasia of a racehorse on the track, the experience of which found its way into what remains for me his most poignant series of works – stark paintings of horses tumbling through space.

The experience of growing up and working on the Gold Coast with an Irish mother and a Greek Cypriot father who was drawn to luxury – most specifically to the idea of owning a Mercedes – but could not afford it, created, it would seem, the constant allusions in Zavros’s work to aspiration, narcissism, glamour and beauty, running in tandem with a continuing existential crisis, and the question – what is it all for? – or more personally perhaps, in Zavros’s case, what is he for?

The breakdown of Zavros’s 30-year marriage to his wife Alison Kubler has definitely been a painful one. But despite the separation 18 months ago, the couple continue to live in the same house. The day before the New Zealand trip, Zavros is more concerned about keeping things together than things falling apart, worrying that his garden would suffer in his absence.

“I’ve got green fingers,” he says, “but big gardens need careful watering, not too much water and not too little, and Alison will just spray things.” It seems an oddly domestic concern, given the separation, but then, as Zavros points out, life goes on. “We decided for the sake of the children that we would try to keep things stable,” he says. “I think it’s something in both of us to just be stoic and get on with things.”

Kubler, 52, has her own stellar career in the arts as editor-in-chief of Vault magazine, and as a principal of Renshaw & Kubler art consultants, and for the past three decades Team Zavros has been a tight unit, particularly as parents to their three children. Yet no matter how stoic they are, I suggest, it can’t be easy for either of them or the children, making the transition from married to separated under the same roof?

“No,” admits Zavros. “It’s been difficult. How could it not be when we’ve had such a rich life together for 32 years? We’ve been in a relationship since I was 19 and Alison was 20. Our lives have been – and in many ways still are – bound up in our home and family.”

The title for the Brisbane exhibition – Things Fall Apart – came to Zavros not from the W. B. Yeats poem but when Olympia brought home from school a novel of that name by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, published in 1958. He remembers his light-bulb moment around the title vividly.

“It was during the cyclone [Alfred] in March, and Olympia was talking about how much she loved the book,” he explains. “I also read it, and the idea in the book of not being able to escape your destiny stayed with me. It occurred to me that a lot of my works at the time were reflecting the idea that everything has its time. Everything changes.”

John McCormack, one of the original founders and directors of the New Zealand gallery, Starkwhite, has had first-hand experience of the way Zavros’s practice has evolved. “When we started showing Michael in 2014, he was the artist with a reputation for painting beautiful things beautifully,” says McCormack, “but later, he turned his gaze to family and self. His work is now inescapably about him: his lifestyle, his interests and how his life intersects with art. The works in Dunedin are incredibly alluring, but at the same time discomfiting because they put the spotlight on thorny issues, such as the way children are pictured in art, in popular culture, or on social media. I love that you have to go beyond the surface of Michael’s work to get to the content. He’s impossible to pigeonhole – he’s a technically superb painter, but he’s also part impresario, part performance artist and part installation artist. It’s my belief good artists should always have projects that push boundaries, as well as the work they do for their collectors.”

Over the past 15 years, pushing boundaries within his practice seems to have been all-encompassing. Everything from a “drowned” Mercedes to bronzes, miniatures, massive canvases, exquisite charcoal drawings, videos and photographs – it appears that all Zavros has to do is to want to do it, and there it is. It may have been partly his ability to step away from the easel that prompted the organisers of the 2025 Gold Coast BLEACH Festival to appoint him as artistic director. The event culminated in Cavalcade – an epic finale on the beach featuring opera, orchestras, dressage and trick riding while a full moon rose from the sea. Imagined by Zavros and directed by Gavin Webber, it was a risky idea with a lot of moving parts.

“For a control freak like me it was scary, and to experience giving up control – because after all, we couldn’t, for example, direct the weather – really took me outside my comfort zone,” says Zavros. “But then, my whole idea had been to explore the concepts of control and freedom, and so I couldn’t back away from that. In the end, it all went brilliantly … but I’m not sure I’d do a festival again. I had to do my best and just let go. I guess, in a way, there’s been a few years of that – ‘the horse is bucking, so hold on.’ But with festivals, ultimately, spreadsheets are really not my thing.”

Spreadsheets may not be his thing, but grand ideas certainly are, and Zavros had the left-field notion of inviting Jeff Koons, arguably the most famous living artist in the world, to attend as a participant. “It was ambitious,” says Zavros, “but I worked in collaboration with the NGA [National Gallery of Australia], who were bringing him to Australia. I’ve always believed that if you want something, it’s worth asking.”

As it turned out, it wasn’t just a professional coup, it also gave Zavros personal inspiration during the troubled time of the separation. “Jeff is probably the artist that’s had the most impact on me, but something curious happened when he and wife, Justine, and five of their children came over to our house for dinner,” he tells me. “The kids got on really well, and even chose to hang out the following week. I watched how much the kids adored their dad, with all of them coming to the public conversation with Alison [at the festival’s opening night], and listening to him with such love and reverence. It occurred to me after the festival that he’d deeply inspired me again, and that rather than his colossal career achievements, his personal and family achievements were much greater – which was quite out of the blue for me. I realised that the most important thing to me was – and is – that my children would feel about me as Jeff’s kids obviously feel about him.”

The idea of “Dad” – good or bad, or even, in the case of his lookalike mannequin, indifferent – has been present in Zavros’s work for several decades, ever since he became a father, but the separation, if the two most recent exhibitions are any indication, seems to have created even more exploration in Zavros’s work of the boundary between his personal life and his art. His work often oscillates between genres – there’s the exploration into bronze-making he started in 2006 featuring a pregnant horse lying down, entitled The waiting one, self-portraits, his children, still life, horses, centaurs, installations and the perfection of his charcoal drawings. And yet, there is also the smallest of works, Head of a horse, a 13-centimetre by 8-centimetre oil on board that Zavros gifted Phoebe for her birthday, and the trembling perfection of Phalaenopsis looking away, the beautiful pale mauve flowers in the blue-and-white pot in the exhibition, sitting on the kitchen bench as we talk.

The interesting dichotomy between the largest of works to the smallest is reflected in his outlook on life. In many ways, his home life is introverted, with many hours spent in the studio. When he’s not at work or with the family, or looking after his menagerie, he’s gardening, which he describes as “my meditation … it’s how I can put everything else aside for a while.” In contrast to his interior life, his finished work, however, has always been extroverted and sure of itself. It makes statements, and Zavros is not really bothered whether the viewer “gets” his allusions or not. “I don’t mind if viewers revel in that first surface level of the painting,” he says. “I have my reasons for creating a work, but I prefer it to have a nuance or an invitation into the deeper meaning.”

‘I’ve always been anxious, and I’ve come to understand that’s part of who I am.’

Michael Zavros

If there is any noted nuance, it must surely be a certain male-centric aesthetic, with the exploration of masculine beauty and iconography so often present in his oeuvre. There’s also a continuing duality between theatricality and vulnerability – present, for example in his 2015 self-portrait, The Sunbather, in which he lies alongside his pool, gazing at his own reflection in the water, the tiniest of squiggles on his hip reading “Ali”, a tattoo he acquired years earlier when the couple were deeply in love. It seems poignant that the painting and tattoo will continue on after the marriage has ended.

After the tumult of the past few years, I wonder if the anxiety and depression he has spoken about has lessened. “Unfortunately, no,” he says. “I’ve always been anxious, and I’ve come to understand that’s part of who I am. I also know that tomorrow is a different day, and that it will pass. I think it’s connected to going through the creative process, where doubt is so important. It’s that knife-edge between doubt and confidence – but the work I do that worries me the most is usually among the best I do.”

It’s a somewhat surreal juxtaposition that a retrospective entitled Meet the Zavros’s is happening almost concurrently with Things Fall Apart, but then this is an artist whose projects constantly explore the tension between art and life, and where those two merge. Of the three children, it’s the two “heads” who have shown the most interest in art, with both Leo and Olympia recently winning prizes for their artworks, although Zavros sees a difference between his lifelong need to be an artist and their interest. “As I child I was already obsessed with drawing and painting,” he says, “whereas both Leo and Olympia have an ability to retain information, and to realise it artistically, but they’re not obsessed in the same way I was.”

When he gets home, a new experiment will be waiting for him. Zavros recently acquired artist Elisabeth Cummings’ beautiful old etching press, and although he hasn’t used it yet, he fully intends to when he is back from New Zealand. “Playing with it,” he says, “will be a reward for the hard work of the last few years.”

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