First monograph.
Within somewhat ominous tableaux of child-like figures lost amongst ceramic landscapes recalling forests and oceans, Wekua's unique vocabulary combines a sweet nostalgia for youth with an almost masochistic relish for history's decay. Based on visions of himself as a child, these doppelgangers harbor a tragic fragility, as they are often blinded or seemingly burned. The fanciful figures of the sculptures reappear in both his paintings and collages in quasi disfigured states.
His soulful and enigmatic imargery becomes almost ritualistic in how it recreates an abstracted vision of personal history, national strife, and imagined refuge.
Working in a diverse array of media, Andro Wekua (born 1977 in Sukhumi, Georgia, lives and works in Switzerland) 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.
Texts by Dieter Schwarz and Rein Wolfs.
Published with the Kunstmuseum Winterthur.
published in 2006
bilingual edition (English / German)
25 x 28,6 cm (hardcover)
208 pages (55 colour ill., 55 b/w ill.)
ISBN : 978-3-905701-86-9
EAN : 9783905701869
sold out
