A body of work in which Žiūra pushes his painting practice into three-dimensionality and challenges expectations of what an image should contain. The various works sharing the title Dead Water all incorporate surfaces poured over with paraffin (sometimes mixed with kerosene to soften it), frames (covered in paraffin, stearin and wax mixture) and glass plate.

The first work in the series, from 1994 (120 × 120 × 12 cm), was an attempt to simultaneously create and negate “the perfect image”, stripped of all pictorial content and accessible only through the glassed frame.

The second manifestation of this idea included a triptych subtitled God’s Pine Grove from 1995 (each piece 160 × 160 × 16 cm, collection of the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius) that further accentuated the stasis of the image.

The third and final stage of the project, executed in 1996, was titled Dead Water: Coffin (80 × 80 × 80 cm) and transposed the image into an object that responds to the visual convention of a fish tank with, or without the dead weight of water.

God’s Pine Grove, 1995
Paraffin, wax, glass on wooden structure, 160 × 160 × 16 cm

God’s Pine Grove
Installation view at the Zachęta Gallery of Art, 1996