Now Open: Spectacular Michael Zavros and eX de Medici Exhibitions Have Arrived at GOMA

Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art started 2023 by musing on air, with floating mirrored spheres, volcanic mounds, and dances between light and darkness to help. When the year comes to an end, it'll turn its attention to fairy tales, complete with twisted woodlands taking over the South Bank venue. In-between, GOMA is shining a spotlight on two Australian artists, Michael Zavros and eX de Medici, in a pair of exhibitions that feature everything from cars to blood swabs.

Running now until Monday, October 2, and filling GOMA for winter as well as the start of spring in the process, Michael Zavros: The Favourite and eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness are taking their status as major surveys of each talent's work seriously. The former covers 90-plus paintings, sculptures, videos, photos and performances by the Queensland artist, while the latter is the most extensive retrospective to-date on the Canberra-based creative and tattooist, spanning more than 100 works.

With The Favourite, GOMA looks back across 25 years of Zavros' art — although Drowned Mercedes is brand new. Created for the exhibition, the sculpture fills the cabin of an original classic 90s Mercedes-Benz SL convertible with water. When attendees peer at the piece, they see their own reflection in the water.

Other Zavros highlights include paintings including Man in a wool suit and Ferragamo 2000, which take inspiration from men's magazines; the Prince/Zavros, with American conceptual artist Richard Prince's late-80s Cowboy images and Marlboro Man tobacco ads an influence; architectural representations Love's temple and Unicorn in the anticamera; and a heap of portraits, with Zavros himself a frequent subject.

Still-life works; equestrian paintings, drawings and sculptures; depictions of rare Japanese Onagadori chickens: they all grace GOMA's walls and halls, too. So does Acropolis Now, a large-scale mural depicting the Parthenon in Athens, which is being turned into a Greek coffee house once a month thanks to folks from Brisbane's Greek community playing backgammon and sipping Greek caffeinated beverages.

"At the core of the exhibition and among the things that differentiate Michael Zavros from other artists of his generation is an unapologetic love of beauty and craftsmanship, folly, and grandeur. Audiences will enter Michael's world. They will see the rigour and breadth of his practice and how his work across multiple media reveals a subtly evolving worldview," said Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art Director Chris Saines.

"His work is inescapably about who he is: his lifestyle — real or imagined — his family, his interests and values."

In Beautiful Wickedness, the gallery harks back four decades, charting eX de Medici's exploration of life's fragility, death, greed, power, conflict and more. Here, visitors can peer at watercolours; intricate botanical studies; ample works featuring flowers and skulls; and even a bridal gown that takes its cues from Julie Andrews' dress in The Sound of Music.

Early pieces include The Blood of Others, which is where those blood swabs come in — from eX de Medici's tattoo clients back in the 90s — while later works go large, feature moths and weapons, and explore war's pointlessness.

"An avowed environmentalist and activist, de Medici's life and career has been dedicated to uncloaking misuses of power and revealing its effects on everyday lives. Exquisitely detailed and technically adept, her often large-scale watercolours seduce the viewer while seeking to expose the shadowy underbelly of consumerism and the long reach of systems of surveillance, authority, and control," said Saines.

"Her artworks conceal surreptitious yet razor-sharp barbs among lush arrangements of historical and contemporary emblems of excess."

Michael Zavros: The Favourite and eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness display at Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art, Stanley Place, South Brisbane from Saturday, June 24–Monday, October 2, 2023. For further details — or to find out more about the gallery's full 2023 slate — visit its website.

Images: installation views of Michael Zavros: The Favourite and eX de Medici: Beautiful Wickedness, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2023. © Michael Zavros and eX de Medici / Photographs: Joe Ruckli © QAGOMA.