Andro Wekua
PRESSE RELEASEANDRO WEKUA
5 March – 9 April 2005
Opening: 4 March from 18 - 20 hours
Andro Wekua will show at his second exhibition at Gallery Peter Kilchmann new installations, sculptures, paintings, drawings and his first 35 mm film. Following the artist’s wish we will reproduce here a text which was written on his work by Gianni Jetzer for Flash Art, no. 241 (March 2005).
“Two strikingly made-up girls are sitting on a plinth, riveted by their black reflection opposite. They attract our attention, exposed as they are in the art-space and yet carefully settled on their artificial piece of furniture. They seem fragile (if not wounded) and yet determined. The installation is in fired clay. The gleam of the glaze covers the whole figure, impregnating it against the outside world, only the hair is permeable. Visitors come on the scene and are confronted momentarily with a certain sense of intimacy. How does one approach this story, their story? And what role is an observing participant supposed to be playing? The title, "Just Kidding", disarms the careworn look. Or it is asking for a carefree childhood and sincerity on a phonetic plane (Just a Kid).
Andro Wekua's work is permeated with a form of instrumentalized fiction. The exhibition as an artistic venue brings a sense of tension to the atmosphere. The numerous mysteries are intentional. We are confronted with "Nameless Streets" or "Mary", a girl who lives in a hotel that has seen better days, apparently as a refugee, "it would have been wonderful". Wekua is a master of the hint, the refined gesture. His narrative structures are precisely flighted and yet astonishingly open. There are suggestions of stories that have already been fully told in the viewers' minds, taking up the artist's imagination.
Wekua was born in Georgia and has lived in Germany and Switzerland for a long time now. He is equally familiar with the realities of life here, in the former Soviet Union and in present-day Georgia. But the Soviet Georgia of his childhood is beyond his reach, and generates a kind of artistic myth. His home town of Sochumi, once a holiday destination for Soviet functionaries, a picturesque coastal town with lemon trees, is now a forbidden zone and so remains a reservoir of memories: his grandmother's house, the Black Sea, political turmoil, the pingpong table behind the house, the monumental freighter at the quayside. Wekua builds up atmospheric images from these fragments. One drawing has "I see" scrawled on it, then a little lower down comes the addition "Black see". We fly blind through a geographical and biographical fiction that sometimes comes very close to the artist himself. Wekua skilfully locates his drawn, collaged or filmed images in a no man's land between East and West, aesthetics and improvisation, confidence and mourning. He constitutes his own, pictorial screenplays that play with his past and yet still stylize it as fiction.
Andro Wekua's art is very directly "artistic" (and yet not academic). He establishes a form of reality that does not exist outside this context. Here he is helped by both his creative imagination and also his ability to constitute fragility on a visual plane. (translated from German by Michael Robinson)
“Two strikingly made-up girls are sitting on a plinth, riveted by their black reflection opposite. They attract our attention, exposed as they are in the art-space and yet carefully settled on their artificial piece of furniture. They seem fragile (if not wounded) and yet determined. The installation is in fired clay. The gleam of the glaze covers the whole figure, impregnating it against the outside world, only the hair is permeable. Visitors come on the scene and are confronted momentarily with a certain sense of intimacy. How does one approach this story, their story? And what role is an observing participant supposed to be playing? The title, "Just Kidding", disarms the careworn look. Or it is asking for a carefree childhood and sincerity on a phonetic plane (Just a Kid).
Andro Wekua's work is permeated with a form of instrumentalized fiction. The exhibition as an artistic venue brings a sense of tension to the atmosphere. The numerous mysteries are intentional. We are confronted with "Nameless Streets" or "Mary", a girl who lives in a hotel that has seen better days, apparently as a refugee, "it would have been wonderful". Wekua is a master of the hint, the refined gesture. His narrative structures are precisely flighted and yet astonishingly open. There are suggestions of stories that have already been fully told in the viewers' minds, taking up the artist's imagination.
Wekua was born in Georgia and has lived in Germany and Switzerland for a long time now. He is equally familiar with the realities of life here, in the former Soviet Union and in present-day Georgia. But the Soviet Georgia of his childhood is beyond his reach, and generates a kind of artistic myth. His home town of Sochumi, once a holiday destination for Soviet functionaries, a picturesque coastal town with lemon trees, is now a forbidden zone and so remains a reservoir of memories: his grandmother's house, the Black Sea, political turmoil, the pingpong table behind the house, the monumental freighter at the quayside. Wekua builds up atmospheric images from these fragments. One drawing has "I see" scrawled on it, then a little lower down comes the addition "Black see". We fly blind through a geographical and biographical fiction that sometimes comes very close to the artist himself. Wekua skilfully locates his drawn, collaged or filmed images in a no man's land between East and West, aesthetics and improvisation, confidence and mourning. He constitutes his own, pictorial screenplays that play with his past and yet still stylize it as fiction.
Andro Wekua's art is very directly "artistic" (and yet not academic). He establishes a form of reality that does not exist outside this context. Here he is helped by both his creative imagination and also his ability to constitute fragility on a visual plane. (translated from German by Michael Robinson)