Der Künstler Andro Wekua mit seinem Werk 4:52 a.m. (Blue), 2008, Courtesy Andro Wekua; Photo: Stephan Wyckoff.

Exhibition view Kunsthalle Wien, Photo: Stephan Wyckoff: Andro Wekua, My Bike and Your Swamp ( 6 pm), 2008, Courtesy Nicoletta Fiorucci Collection, Rome © Andro Wekua.

Exhibition view Kunsthalle Wien, Photo: Stephan Wyckoff.

Andro Wekua, 1995, 2009, Courtesy: André and Jocelyne Gordts-Vanthournout Collection, Belgium © Andro Wekua.

Andro Wekua, Untitled, 2009, Courtesy Andro Wekua & Gladstone Gallery, New York © Andro Wekua.

Kunsthalle Wien
Project Space
Museumsplatz 1
+43-1-52189-33
Vienna
Andro Wekua
Never Sleep with a Strawberry
in Your Mouth
February 18-June 5, 2011

The intensity and variety of my feeling are so strong that I have to do something with it because it kind of splits me apart.

— Andro Wekua

Never Sleep with a Strawberry in Your Mouth is the title of Andro Wekua’s latest film finished for the present exhibition. The surreal title, which does hardly make sense as an instruction, astounds us with a nonsensical logic which is characteristic of the seductive power of symbolic art. Whether object, landscape, figure or portrait, the hyperreal beauty and absurdity of Andro Wekua’s works, their detachment from the world and their self unfold in an interplay between closeness and distance, intimacy and desire. The artist’s pictorial solutions are fuelled by everyday impressions and personal recollections which often focus on his childhood in the city of Sukhumi on the Black Sea in Georgia, where Wekua was born.

Anxious to see his works precisely executed in craft terms and developing an artistic practice taking its inspiration from the structure of palimpsests, the master collagist uses nearly every medium: the concord of space, sculpture, film, and two with elements of poetic self interweaving individual pieces to a gesamtkunstwerk’s larger contexts of meaning that leave the White Cube behind and make room for enigmatic atmospheres. In conjunction with large projections and darkened rooms, emotionally impressive arrangements, stage constructions, and a space within a space provide the starting-point for a sensual art and its theatrical mise-en-scene. Andro Wekua's work does comprise narrative impulses. Yet, in order to stimulate the viewers’ fantasies and associations, the artist deliberately confronts them with caesuras and does without a narrative flow. Again and again whims erupt both in the gesture and the terror of introspection: “Of course it doesn’t have to do with real violence — more with an atmosphere of violence, a threat, an oppressive atmosphere,” says the artist.

Wekua furnishes his three-dimensional structures with individual auratic figures, mostly life-size young women made of wax that sprawl on shining chromium-plated motorcycles like in My Bike and Your Swamp 6 pm and, in their androgyny, resemble mannequins. His figures are oblivious to the world and have no eyes because the artist does not want them to return the visitor’s gaze, as he says. Endowed with a mannerist disposition and stoic calm, they live in a time of delay. Waiting with no end in sight, they breathe a somnambulistic security characteristic of melancholy. They have nothing to lose since they are not threatened by finiteness. With their ambiguous gestures and stereotyped poses, they are subject to a rhythm of attraction and repulsion, perfection and obsession and unfold an “anatomy of desire” that is sometimes reminiscent of works by Hans Bellmer and Medardo Rosso. Wekua’s frequently oppressive reflections on the beautiful body hint at Classicist implications, yet the artist pitilessly examines historical formulae of sculpture regarding their present suitability, sidesteps them, or installs placeholders for interpretation and resonance.

Curator of the exhibition is Angela Stief.

Andro Wekua was born in 1977; he studied in Georgia and Switzerland (Basel). He has lived and worked in Berlin and Zurich since 2007. Selected solo exhibitions: 2010 Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin / Gladstone Gallery, Brussels. 2009 Wiels, Brussels / Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich / Museion, Bolzano. 2008 Camden Art Center, London / Le Magasin CNAC, Grenoble. 2007 Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. 2006 Kunstmuseum Winterthur. Selected group exhibitions: 2010 8th Gwangju Biennale / New Museum, New York / Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. 2009 Albright Paris / 4th Berlin Biennale, Berlin.

A three-part publication is forthcoming on the occasion of the exhibition. Edited by Kunsthalle Wien, Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, and Castello di Rivoli, Torino. With texts by Douglas Fogle and Miciah Hussey. German/English/Italian. Publishers: Walther König.

Exhibition view Kunsthalle Wien, Pphoto: Stephan Wyckoff: Andro Wekua, Untitled, 2010, Courtesy of the Artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels © Andro Wekua.

Exhibition view Kunsthalle Wien, Photo: Stephan Wyckoff: Andro Wekua, My Bike and Your Swamp ( 6 pm), 2008, Courtesy Nicoletta Fiorucci Collection, Rome © Andro Wekua.

Camden
Arts Centre
Arkwright Road
London
+44 (0)20 7472 5500
Andro Wekua
December 5-
February 1, 2009

Andro Wekua's emotionally demanding paintings, drawings, prints, collages, films, and imposing sculptural tableaux deal with myth and a claustrophobic seclusion. The denial of vision is a leitmotif of the uncanny life-size cast figures that populate his art — their eyes appear to have been smothered with paste, put out with pokers, or disguised with theatrical masks. In Get out of my room (2006), this lack of sight affects the cast figure of a schoolboy dressed in a shirt and black lace-up shoes. Wekua pointedly resists exoticizing narratives of loss, trauma, turmoil, and displacement that might easily be attributed to his artwork, because as a child, he was forced to flee the violence of the war-torn former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Memory, instead, is assumed to be no more authentic, or no less artificial, than the silver-screen-star portraits that wend their way into his collages or the classical or Freudian symbolism that his sculptures might animate.

For his first solo exhibition in the UK, Andro Wekua has created a new installation. Wekua’s richly coloured works have an innate melancholy. They read on multiple levels like poems, meanings are revealed slowly to leave a haunting atmosphere.

Wekua uses a variety of media and materials including sculpture, drawing, collage and film. He incorporates rubber with its casting properties to pick up the delicate differences of surfaces, and wax to accentuate the lifeless faces of mannequins like dejected puppets waiting to be animated.

Wekua employs the skill of the craft maker and the tradition of collage. He takes images from fashion magazines to create a unique visual poetry. Abstract passages of paint and colour trace features and accentuate forms. Compositions and contexts overwrite them with interlocking geometric shapes.

Born 1977 in Sochumi, Georgia, Andro Wekua moved to Switzerland in 2001 and now lives in Berlin. Andro Wekua works with sculpture, drawing/collage, painting and video. When he’s not sculpting and painting, he draws and collages images from magazine advertisements or images that could be family snapshots. He creates dream-like stages with mysterious doppelgänger figures in melancholic atmospheres. And when he’s not doing all that, Wekua amuses himself with his acquired taste for 70’s fast automobiles.

Recent exhibitions include: Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International, 2008: Interlude, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Wait to Wait, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2007; Manor Kunstpreis, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Without Mirror, Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2006: Expanded Painting, Prague Biennale 2, Lively Memories, Plattform, Berlin, Del Rio, Shirana Shahbazi & Andro Wekua, Zimmerfrei, Lugano, 2005.