This coming weekend (Saturday 31 May) we open Michael Zavros: Bad Dad and launch a new publication on his work with writing by Robert Leonard, Chief Curator at the City Gallery Wellington, and an interview with the artist conducted by Rhana Devenport, Director of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, who will also open the exhibition.
While Zavros has exhibited previously in New Zealand at Auckland Artspace in 2005 (Uncanny (the unnaturally strange)), and at Govett Brewster Gallery, New Plymouth in 2007 (New Nature), this is his first solo exhibition in New Zealand. Bad Dad brings together new paintings and drawings with a selection of important past works borrowed from private, public and the artist’s own collections in an exhibition that offers an introduction to the artist’s rich and complex oeuvre.
“In the consistency, coherence and cunning of his post-criticality, Michael Zavros cuts an unusual figure. Other artists are postcritical. Other artists make likeable art. Other artists are rated, curated and collected. Other artists are profiled in the glossies, are well connected and live the good life. Other artists nag the boundaries between life and art. But Zavros has tied these thoughts together and granted them the force, clarity and self-consciousness of a project – a paradigm. In doing so he has become a reference point in Australian art that other positions must be read against. Because of this, his art is as much about what it is not as about what it is. It can be read both in itself, as a self-contained system (a hall of mirrors), and in terms of its relation to other work. The art world looks different with Zavros in it.” Robert Leonard
Image: cover of Bad Dad published on the occasion of Michael Zavros' first solo show at Starkwhite, design by Inhouse, Auckland
