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There’s a strange beeping in the background when Michael Zavros answers the phone. “I’m eight metres up on a scissor lift and terribly afraid of heights,” says the acclaimed artist with a nervous laugh.

When we speak he is finishing up a large-scale new work as part of The Favourite at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art, an exhibition that looks back over the past 25 years of his career.

Michael Zavros in front of his new work Acropolis Now at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. Credit: Dan Peled

There will be just shy of 130 works on display. While Zavros is best known for his hyperrealistic large-scale paintings, including a commission from the Australian War Memorial for a portrait of Ben Roberts-Smith, his practice also spans photography, video and sculpture.

Putting together this show with curator Peter McKay has been like reading back over an old diary.

“Artists make very autobiographical things, whether they mean to or not,” he says. Through the works chosen for The Favourite you can see his children grow up, his interests ebb and flow, his ideas solidify, his techniques evolve.

“I remember such specific things about the time that I was making each work,” says Zavros. He compares it to catching a hint of a familiar perfume and being transported back to a particular moment or feeling. “It’s full of ghosts for me.”

Phoebe is dead/McQueen. 2010/oil on canvas/110 x 150cm/Moran Arts Foundation.Credit: Michael Zavros

There are different threads you can follow through the works chosen. His daughter Phoebe is a recurring subject.

There’s Phoebe is Dead/McQueen, the painting that saw Zavros take out the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2010. There’s Phoebe is Eight/Tom Ford (2014), in which she stares out of frame in oversized sunglasses that give a hint of the world around her. And there’s Mum’s Wedding Dress (2021), which treads the line between comfort and intensity with deceptive ease.

The painting was sparked by a spontaneous moment. “One day [Phoebe] came out wearing my wife’s wedding dress and she looked amazing,” Zavros explains. “It just fit her, and it was a very confrontational thing – my daughter wearing my wife’s wedding dress. It’s incredibly loaded – and yet in a very simple way, it’s very innocent and very beautiful.”

What Zavros aims to capture in his portraits is different every time, depending on his relationship with the sitter.

Mum’s wedding dress. 2021/oil on canvas/160 x 205cm.Credit: Michael Zavros

He always starts with an idea, but whether the final image aims to capture a moment, a truth or the essence of a particular person is more muddy. This extends to his Narcissus-inspired self-portraits, including Bad Dad, which was shortlisted for the Archibald Prize in 2013.

He describes all these works as part portrait and part figure painting. Whether he is featured in the painting or not, “I’m often in role play, and the kids are too. They understand that it is not a portrait of them necessarily, but it is at the same time,” he reflects. “Apart from a likeness, the portrait sometimes tells us something about myself or another figure – but sometimes it really doesn’t.”

For a person who doesn’t shy away from looking inwards, who is known for very literal self-reflection, The Favourite serves as the largest-scale portrait of the artist yet.

Even while he is looking back, Zavros is pushing his boundaries going forward. For the exhibition, he has created – or, more accurately at the time we speak, is still creating – three new works.

Zavros works on his self-portrait Bad Dad (2013).Credit: Courtesy of Michael Zavros

There’s a new bronze work, a large-scale installation that he says is unlike anything he’s done before, and there’s Acropolis Now, the huge painting of the Parthenon that has him up on a scissor lift for the duration of the call.

The latter he describes as a “kitsch, selfie moment” and “very much about spectacle”. Most unusually, it’s a work that won’t have a life beyond the exhibition, but its transience is part of the appeal for him.

“These three new works that I’m talking about, they were all incredibly difficult to realise, and each one I just wasn’t sure whether it would make the opening. There’s so much that could go wrong,” he says. “And I think they will all be fine. But right up until this week, all three of them could have failed.”

With so many works to draw from for this exhibition, though, why take this risk? And why take it threefold?

To push his limits, Zavros explains, and because when an idea takes hold, that’s it. “I imagine something and I start to obsess about it – I have to make it,” he says. “It’s like I can’t survive until I have made this work.”

There’s also a layer of local pride for the Brisbane-born artist. “It’s my first solo state show,” he explains. “It just offers up an opportunity to do something special – and I really wanted to challenge myself.”

Michael Zavros: The Favourite is at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, alongside eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness, from June 24 until October 2, 2023.

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