Gregor Kregar

b. 1972, Slovenia
Lives in Auckland

Operating in a wide range of materials, scales and forms, Gregor Kregar has forged a reputation as one of New Zealand’s leading contemporary sculptors. Born in Slovenia in 1972, Kregar exhibits regularly throughout Australasia and Europe. Highlights of his exhibition history include involvement in the Cairo Biennale and the 29th Ljubljana Biennale in 2011, and a solo exhibition at Tin Shed Gallery as a collateral event to Sydney Bienniale in 2008.

Kregar works with an extensive range of media, from stainless and cor-ten steel, glazed porcelain, and cast glass through to bronze and fiberglass. He states, “my work is not confined to any single medium or material. In my sculptural practice I often combine a wide variety of materials such as stainless steel, plastic, cardboard, ceramic, glass, video and photography.” Kregar’s skill in managing this wide range of materials is mirrored in the diversity of his subject matter. Abstract geometries are as much a part of his repertoire as figures of sheep, humans and gnomes. “I am interested in how the familiar subject can be represented in a way that displaces the original meaning and imbues the subject with new and unfamiliar meanings,” he says.

Kregar runs a large-scale industrial workshop where he produces most of his work. This facility is frequented by architects and engineers as much as curators and gallerists, and it has been central to his production of numerous large-scale ambitious art works and installations for public and private contexts.

Kregar is the recipient of many awards and prestigious commissions, including the Melbourne-based 2015 Southern Way McClelland Commission (2013), the Lexus Premier Award as well as People’s Choice Awards at Headland Sculpture on the Gulf (2013), Paramount Award, Wallace Art Awards (2000), a permanent installation at the Christchurch International Airport (2012), the Art Omni Residency at McColl Art Centre New York, USA (2006) and a commission for a permanent work at the Lekhwiya Sports Stadium in Doha.

His work is held in significant public collections including Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, The Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. Kregar has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Academy of Fine Arts, University of Ljubljana, 1996) and a Masters of Fine Arts (Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, 1999).

Gow Langsford Gallery has represented Gregor Kregar since 2009.

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Cultural Nature, Gregor Kregar's inaugural solo exhibition with Gow Langsford Gallery features an immersive environment of gleaming metallic sculpture and glazed stoneware ceramics. Disrupting the conventional gallery space, abstract sculptures hang from the ceiling and seemingly grow from the walls. Several of the structures are highly reflective and mirror the viewer and surrounding space in refracted shards. An integral component of Kregar's practice to date has been the interactive element of much of his work. For this exhibition, in addition to reflective materials such as stainless steel, Kregar has been working with new substances such as chameleon paint. This relies on the viewer's movement around the work to reveal the paint's multi-coloured properties and the theretofore hidden variability of the work.

The distinctive form of Kregar's aluminium and stainless steel works is key to many of the concerns explored within his wider practice. The pieces embody the contradictions of nature versus culture, and the mathematical versus a more intuitive artistic process. Comprised of a number of smaller geometrical units, the works appear self-determining, growing like crystalline formations. Their structure echoes some of our world's more elemental building blocks - of molecules, of DNA. Developed from small cardboard models, Kregar also refers to his large, full size works as models. Inherent in this reference is a realm of possibility, stemming from the artist's interest in Constructivism and utopian architecture, and the different ways in which sculpture can operate.