Andro Wekua

Andro Wekua was born in 1977 in Sokhumi, Georgia, and currently lives and works between Zurich and Berlin. He trained at the National Art School in his hometown from 1986 to 1991, and continued his studies first in Tbilisi and then in Basel, where he attended the Visual Art School from 1995 to 1999. His art, deeply autobiographical and tied to the historical events that affected Georgia following the collapse of the USSR, serves as a means to narrate his story, functioning as a kind of artistic myth.

In the late 1980s, after the death of his father, the artist was forced to leave his country with his mother to escape the war and the subsequent ethnic cleansing perpetrated in the Abkhazia region. Today, the area, indirectly occupied by Russia, has transformed Sokhumi, once a seaside town, into a ghost city, half-abandoned and dilapidated. Through his experiences and studies, Wekua has become a versatile artist who works with various media: from painting and collage to wax or ceramic sculpture and video installations. All of his works convey a sense of personal tragedy; they are dark and anxiety-inducing, addressing themes of alienation and solitude, if not death. The color palette is consistently cold, ranging from icy blues to frequently recurring purples.

The characters in his works, drawn from real life, are directly sourced from personal albums where, alongside family photographs, Wekua preserves clippings from newspapers, books, and postcards. Through these, he skillfully relates the figurative and geometric abstraction with a cold elegance, as seen in the sculpture titled Three Times 3. When the human figure is depicted, it is always impaired or deformed, with disfigured eyes or other anomalous anatomical details. For example, Woman is characterized by nervous, vigorous brushstrokes that lean towards an expressionistic rendering of the subject, who, despite being a woman, loses all warmth due to the cold colors Wekua employs, such as violet and the brown-black of the background. As always, in this case too, he disfigures the face of his subject with a scar across the nose.

Wekua chooses the incomplete and the imperfect to demonstrate, through these absences, that man is not always capable of remembering everything. The “mannequins,” another obsession of the artist, which in past art were traditionally understood as a form of homage or commemoration, in Wekua’s version—halfway between children and teenagers missing something—evoke thoughts of death, presence-absence, alienation, and resurrection.

The piece in the Iannaccone collection titled Shoulders Grow As Sun Goes Down In My Belly is notable for a steel tube embedded in the stomach of a young burn victim, right at the center of the sunset that decorates his tank top. It seems that through these symbols, the artist seeks to represent the deep concern that haunts him: strongly fascinated by what his city might have become, he is eager to tell its story and reflect on the importance of memories, describing it as “an empty stage between two acts.”