Andro Wekua

Andro Wekua, Without Mirror

Mark Von Schlegell

Daniel Feinberg

Augusta Joyce

Working in a diverse array of media, Andro Wekua has developed a visual language grounded in the exploration of human experience through the subtle intersections of individual and pooled memory, personal identity, and history.Drawing on genres such as fantasy, science-fiction, and horror, Wekua creates fantastical and often macabre tableaux, revealing the complex processes of reconstruction and fragmentation that continually inform the personal, social, and fictive experience of remembrance.Creating pictorial representations of the past to better comprehend and grapple with the present, Wekua meditates on the tenuous boundary between historical reality and the artificial construct of remembering, pointing to the inescapable fact that the past is always distorted by the subjectivity of memory.This book features the text Sebastapolis (Interview with A.) by cultural critic and science-fiction writer Mark von Schlegell. Images of new works from the artist's 2012 exhibition at Gladstone Gallery include large colourful abstractions, as well as Wekua's signature collages and portraits.

Dreaming Dreaming

Alessandro Baricco

His home town, Sochumi, which was once a renowned seaside resort, has left Wekua with a rich wellspring of memories, stories and imaginings that are perceptible in all of his works. Yet he is not interested in memories for their own sake: his works explore our reactions to certain images and situations. Viewing his works, as with a collage, visitors can combine all the micro-narratives, narratives that mingle fact and fiction, and personal and collective imaginings, constantly giving rise to new stories. At the hub of the exhibition, Workshop Report there are two videos, Sicut Lilium Inter Spinas (2003) and By the Window (2008). The first begins and ends with the image of a house overlooking the sea, evoking fragments of the artist's childhood which the sea, evoking fragments of the artist's childhood which include his father's funeral. In the second a boy/mannequin sits with his feet on a table in a box/theatrical set of changing colours, inside which, on a window/screen there alternate visual evocations of waves, sunsets over the sea, moving mannequins, a house in the hills. English text.

Workshop Report

Georgian artist Andro Wekua (born 1977) uses painting, collage, drawing, installation, sculpture and film to reflect on childhood, memory and political history in his depictions of fictional and dream-like realities, documented in this first comprehensive publication.

...No One was There, She Did Not Know It...

Boris Groĭs

A Conversation

Wait to Wait

Andro Wekua

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