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From live sheep to ceramic piggy banks and giant, floating geometric shapes, Gregor Kregar's sculptural menagerie suggests that he is not an artist seduced by a single subject. Nor can one material tie him down; he picks and chooses between glass and steel, plastic and terracotta, cardboard, video, photography and livestock. Like the varied combinations of polyhedrons he creates, this Slovenian-born, Auckland-based artist is indeed multifaceted.

Take 'Piercing the Clouds' at Sydney's Tins Sheds Gallery in 2008, an exhibition akin to a futuristic landscape; all colossal shiny forms and seemingly endless space. Here Kregar fashioned numerous and fractured cloudscapes using sculpture, video projection and three-dimensionally rendered photographic works. Along with other site-specific installations (Brick bay polyhedron, 2006, Sky housing project 1, 2007, Shelter structure 1 and 2, 2006)  there is a definite dreamy quality to this work, yet underneath a structural and scientific logic is at play. Whether towering ominously or floating majestically, Kregar's structures activate space by altering visual perspective. Objects are lost and found in the visual flick of the eye back and forth, up and down, across his many planes and angles ...

This gentle jostle between appearance and disappearance also manifests itself in Kregar's figurative work. His glazed stoneware piece, Vanish, 2008, installed on Waiheke Island in New Zealand, comprises 160 doppelgangers of the artist ranging from 140-centimetres tall down to 40 centimetres. Depending on one's viewpoint, the army of Gregors either burgeons steadily forward or vanishes into the distance. No need for wordy critique or theories about the power of the viewer to induce meaning, here perspective literally and instantaneously determines the artist's growth or diminishment...

Questions of identity and ego, particularly to do with that of 'the artist', follow the thread of pop artists who have questioned the paradigm of the lone genius forging the singular masterpiece. Vanish is one of a number of Kregar's works that draw on the multiple as the enemy of individuality. The romance of the artist is lost in this exponential growth; death by reproduction ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2009 issue.