Andro Wekua employs the skill of the craft maker and the atmosphere of the theatre to create introspective, melancholic, cinematic installations whose multiple meanings leave the work being read like poems, where meanings are shrouded and revealed slowly and the atmosphere is intense.
An enigmatic and prolific artist, Wekua works across a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, collage and film. For what is his first solo exhibition in the UK, Wekua (born Georgia, 1977) presents a new installation My Bike and Your Swamp, incorporating a rubber sculpture cast from a motorcycle, on which a reclining wax figure faces backwards. It stands amidst a staged display of paintings and graphic works. He has also showed a new film which was screened throughout the duration of the exhibition.
In his graphic works, images are culled from fashion magazines and photographs are saturated in colour. Abstract passages of paint and colour trace their features and accentuating their forms. Compositions and contexts overwrite them with interlocking geometric shapes.
From the intimacy of his drawings to ambitious installations, Wekua draws from an often painful past, having grown up in Georgia near the Black Sea, a country still plagued by violence. Memories tinged with pain lend added poignancy and intimacy to the complex accumulations of marks and images in his works.
Organised by Camden Art Centre in collaboration with the artist and De Hallen, Haarlem