In his first Sydney exhibition in more than a decade, multi award-winning Australian artist Michael Zavros augments his exploration of the artist as art, in a new body of work, A Guy Like Me, to be presented at Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney October 15 to November 14.

 Best known for his beautifully realised paintings – typically depicting beautiful, luxurious, aspirational things – A Guy Like Me, represents a transition into new territory.

At the heart of the series is a plastic mannequin, modelled on Zavros himself but in the artists’ words, “he’s a better version of me – 6 foot 3, broader, more cut, a bit younger and a lot smoother”.

Created over a period of months Zavros’ avatar wears his own familiar visage – carefully sculpted, scanned, 3D printed and then finished in the soft airbrushed tones favoured by in-store models, to deliberately reinforce its non-human status.

With his stand-in cast in a starring role, Zavros steps into new art director shoes, overseeing the creation of a series of large-scale magazine-style photographs, mimicking the outwardly perfect life with which he has become associated.

As with much of his work, Zavros’ latest pieces will be carefully constructed and highly aesthetic – even beautiful, yet with a subtle, uncanny and potentially disturbing element.

In these sumptuously styled lifestyle shots, a central figure enjoys the best of life’s pleasures. But what happens when the central figure is not man but mannequin?

An extension of his rich body of work commenting on status, vanity and narcissism, A Guy Like Me is primarily concerned with what Zavros describes as “the strange performance between the artist and life, and the point at which the two become indiscernible”.

This is a particularly personal theme for Zavros, whose work has often – famously, notoriously and sometimes controversially – included images of himself or his family.

“Much of my work could be described as autobiographical” Zavros comments. “The self-portraits, the portraits of my children, and the images I construct that appear to document my life.”

On social media too – where he enjoys an enviable fan base including close to 95,000 Instagram followers – Zavros notes, “There is a representation of who I am, even though that representation often tips into a kind of fiction”.

Much has been written about these constant “life” references in Zavros artworks, the resultant interplay between artist and audience, and the implications for how the artist and his work have come to be “seen”.

Art critic Robert Leonard speaks of Zavros’ work encompassing “not only references to his life – his love of horses and chickens, his children, his possessions and pleasures, but his life itself.”

“While some rail against the gulf between Zavros’ representations and his life as lived”, Leonard comments, “his real life proves them wrong by catching up with his fantasy. Zavros is increasingly able to enjoy the lifestyle he depicts, to become what he paints”. As such, he concludes, Zavros’ life imitates art and he himself becomes the consummate artwork.

With Zavros’ media visibility so high, Leonard also claims that, “We can no longer see Zavros’ work ‘in itself’, we must read it in relation to his life, as mediated by the media.”

“For all its appeal to old school virtues of fine draftsmanship and patient rendering,” Leonard concludes, “his work could also belong to a lineage of conceptual-art projects exploring the collapse of art into life.”

A Guy Like Me plays with these notions by introducing us to a guy like Zavros, but not so like him you could confuse the real for his fabricated body double.

In the knowledge that this mannequin is not who he appears to be lies an opportunity: to either distance fiction from reality, or alternately to merge the two; and for the audience to consider their own role in this crucial interplay.

In perceiving art as real life, and the curated world of social media as authentic, are we inviting the artist to create, or demanding they be consumed by their own ingenuity?

Michael Zavros, A Guy Like Me opens Thursday October 15 at Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney, 799 Elizabeth Street, Zetland. View online at sullivanstrumpf.com/

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