Oliver Croy

The Austrian artist Oliver Croy concluded his residency with an exhibition at the Locker Plant. Croy’s work ranges across a variety of media to playfully engage different aspects of contemporary architecture and real estate. He is particularly interested in alternative or unconventional types of housing—the sort that has been hand-built in out-of-the-way places by solitary obsessives or small groups of like-minded dreamers. Croy is interested in the sometimes utopian, sometimes purely practical concerns which motivate people to build these unorthodox structures, and in the unusual, often cast-off materials employed in their making. Croy has also compiled and edited two books. Sondermodelle (Special Models) (2001) and Hot Properties (2006).

For his show at the Locker Plant, Croy exhibited a work-in-progress featuring hand-painted signage the artist created during his stay in Marfa. Each sign bore a phrase or slogan plucked from newspaper porn ads, the words blown up tenfold or more from their original size and carefully painted by hand to mimic to the original newspaper fonts. Croy then photographed the signs standing in front of select houses in Marfa.

Oliver Croy was born in Austria in 1970. He graduated from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna and lives and works in Berlin. Croy has exhibited work in numerous venues across Europe, including L’attitude des autres, Marseilles; Atelier Tilman Wendland, Berlin; Kunsthalle Malmoe, Sweden; and the Overgarden Institute of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen. He has also exhibited work at the MAK Center, Los Angeles in 2003 and 2004 and at the Inax Gallery in Nagoya, Japan in 2004. In September 2006 Croy had a solo exhibition at the Overgarden Institute for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen and participated in the Werkleitz Biennale at the Halle Stadtturmgallery in Innsbruck, Austria.