Andro Wekua
All is Fair in Dreams and War
09 Jun - 05 Aug 2018
Installation View, Andro Wekua, All is Fair in Dreams and War, Kunsthalle Zürich, 2018
Photo: Annik Wetter
Photo: Annik Wetter
ANDRO WEKUA
All is Fair in Dreams and War
09 June – 05 August 2018
Kunsthalle Zürich presents the largest solo exhibition to date of the Georgian artist Andro Wekua. On show are older and little known works, as well as new sculptures, a selection of current paintings and collages as well as the world premier of his newest film All is Fair in Dreams and War (2018). Wekua’s art leaves no one indifferent, whether you happen to like the work or not. It is unabashed and intensive, it shines with a knowledge of materials, form, staging and the power of images possesses a distinctive feeling for both enticement and denial. The result is the creation of evocative and often uncanny spaces. They are places between before and after that serve to conjure a present where time itself appears to be waiting.
Taking a long view of the work, the various motifs that the artist has been reconfiguring like a set of chess pieces for twenty years become apparent: the house, the landscape, the interior, the animal, the figure, the face, the machine. We know this variation, re-formulating and interlacing of motifs from music, literature and film. In art, this approach has been somewhat forgotten, or is erroneously equated with repetition. However Wekua’s work shows how important motifs are, how they circle and capture impressions, memories and the unutterable. Landscapes of the soul are thus evoked, whose depths one might gladly wish to escape, be it by leaving the exhibition.
These are by no means just apparent inner-worlds outside of time. History plays an important role here – or to put it better: another experience of history. Wekua’s art has been beholden to his interests and his life in the West since 1995, but also to his time before that in Sochumi, Tbilisi and civil war-affected Georgia. In his work west meets east, or more precisely east encounters west, though not as opposites, as many would like to see it, but as a complex and contradictory entanglement: „It is directed against everything that belongs to the system of art” (Wekua). Colour is central, but also – somewhat surprisingly – the seam. It is the scar and the punctuation mark of his work , nothing and yet everything. Because a seam is wholly dependant on the parts which it connects, and without them it is lost. Without a seam there is no film (the cut is a seam), no collage (joined by cutting). The same is true for Wekua’s sculptures or any of his latest paintings, many of which will be on show for the first time in Zürich. In its arbitrariness the seam reminds us that art is always a composition; that it is artificial, and like a text, a film, or a stage, reality is condensed. This double experience is what we will be exposed to in Kunsthalle Zürich: All is Fair in Dreams and War.
Andro Wekua was born in 1977 in Sochumi (former Soviet Union).
All is Fair in Dreams and War
09 June – 05 August 2018
Kunsthalle Zürich presents the largest solo exhibition to date of the Georgian artist Andro Wekua. On show are older and little known works, as well as new sculptures, a selection of current paintings and collages as well as the world premier of his newest film All is Fair in Dreams and War (2018). Wekua’s art leaves no one indifferent, whether you happen to like the work or not. It is unabashed and intensive, it shines with a knowledge of materials, form, staging and the power of images possesses a distinctive feeling for both enticement and denial. The result is the creation of evocative and often uncanny spaces. They are places between before and after that serve to conjure a present where time itself appears to be waiting.
Taking a long view of the work, the various motifs that the artist has been reconfiguring like a set of chess pieces for twenty years become apparent: the house, the landscape, the interior, the animal, the figure, the face, the machine. We know this variation, re-formulating and interlacing of motifs from music, literature and film. In art, this approach has been somewhat forgotten, or is erroneously equated with repetition. However Wekua’s work shows how important motifs are, how they circle and capture impressions, memories and the unutterable. Landscapes of the soul are thus evoked, whose depths one might gladly wish to escape, be it by leaving the exhibition.
These are by no means just apparent inner-worlds outside of time. History plays an important role here – or to put it better: another experience of history. Wekua’s art has been beholden to his interests and his life in the West since 1995, but also to his time before that in Sochumi, Tbilisi and civil war-affected Georgia. In his work west meets east, or more precisely east encounters west, though not as opposites, as many would like to see it, but as a complex and contradictory entanglement: „It is directed against everything that belongs to the system of art” (Wekua). Colour is central, but also – somewhat surprisingly – the seam. It is the scar and the punctuation mark of his work , nothing and yet everything. Because a seam is wholly dependant on the parts which it connects, and without them it is lost. Without a seam there is no film (the cut is a seam), no collage (joined by cutting). The same is true for Wekua’s sculptures or any of his latest paintings, many of which will be on show for the first time in Zürich. In its arbitrariness the seam reminds us that art is always a composition; that it is artificial, and like a text, a film, or a stage, reality is condensed. This double experience is what we will be exposed to in Kunsthalle Zürich: All is Fair in Dreams and War.
Andro Wekua was born in 1977 in Sochumi (former Soviet Union).