Andro Wekua

Andro Wekua is a Georgian artist now based in Zurich and Berlin, whose repertoire is abundant in variety - he makes films, creates clay figures with wondrously glazed surfaces, produces collages that combine photography, drawing and painting and he paints on canvas in a style that manifests both mannerism and virtuosity, piecing together fragmented fictions pictorially representing no-where worlds of mystery and intrigue.

Wekua was born in 1977 in Sukhumi, Georgia, where he witnessed an ethnic conflict in Abkhazia. His father, the Georgian political activist, was killed by the Abkhaz nationalists during the 1989 Sukhumi riots. He studied at the National Art School in Sukhumi, followed by the Visual Art School in Basel.

In his creations, Andro Wekua draws on his own biography as a resource, weaving it into fiction. Wekua’s oeuvre and ephemeral miscellanea bring together diverse topographic and geographic entities, histories, and characters, each woven into a net. These images are taken from the artist’s personal albums or found as postcards, books and in television. At one level, sprinkled references to the artist’s past evince a complex, personal symbolism rooted in Wekua’s childhood in Soviet Georgia. Yet Wekua’s sources remain for the most part obscure, and his method of layering paint and blurring filmic images is equally obfuscating, suggesting that his charged iconography may function to evoke less a specific past than the commonality of all private, imagined lives. His collaged images give cinematic flair, providing potential cast, setting, and narrative for viewers’ interpretation, subtly entwining their personal references with his own. Shaped into myth and saga, his story serves as an exhaustless reservoir of new ideas, mainly referring to childhood - boys and girls incorporate this flashback appropriately as symbols of the beginning of every life story and the openness with which it unfolds.

Wekua’s multi-part installations featuring cast mannequins, abstract sculptures, figurative painting, drawing, collage and film dispersed throughout carefully conceived environments are overwhelming in both scope and psychological content. The uneasy co-existence of openness, on the one hand, and withholding, on the other, runs throughout the artist’s work, nowhere more dramatically than in his signature cast-wax mannequins. As in all Wekua’s installations, the contrast between the mannequins’ postures and their presentation is discomfiting. Formally and psychologically reserved, the figures are nonetheless theatrically presented, less discrete entities than variations on one another. His traditional working method – he casts live models in wax – renders his personages both strangely lifelike and spookily artificial.

The artist’s work has been exhibited in numerous venues around Europe and the United States. Andro Wekua separates his time and creates in Zurich, Switzerland, and Berlin, Germany.