Gregor Zivic

b. 1965, Austria

These collages are not the result of any post-production or after-treatment by computer. What one sees in my photographs is the real, actual state of my 29m2 apartment. Three repeated components take part in each photograph that I have taken up to now. First, every photograph shows one well-chosen oil painting that I have done in the last seven years. Second, I use an exact copy of the entrance gate to my parents’ house in Vienna; and third, there is me involved in different stories and split up in variable figures and characters – for instance, me as a woman or me with black eyes. It is important to realise that I never intend to document my paintings with photography, but the photographs are transformed by where I am allowed to bring them in various correlations. This became obvious when I used one of my oil paintings as a company emblem on a truck, shown on both ‘Greg Oil’ photographs. So one can say that the images of my paintings in the photographs are important for the whole picture in terms of colour, dimensions and form, and they cannot be dropped. The different people you see in the photograph next to you maybe cannot see one straight story, but when the whole series is finished, you will imagine similarly looking through a kaleidoscope, a narration. Besides, it is important for me that all facts and proceedings are comprehensible to everybody simply be looking at my photographs. So all kinds of constructions, mirror effects and wooden supporting pillars can be seen in my pictures.

(Text: friends + neighbours catalogue, 2000)