Andro Wekua: All is Fair in Dreams and War

All is Fair in Dreams and War provides a view of the motifs Andro Wekua has positioned in various constellations, like a set of pieces on a chessboard, for almost 20 years: the house, the landscape, the interior, the animal, the figure, the face, the seam. We know variation, recombination, and the development of themes as creative strategies in the realms of music, literature, and film. Only in visual art have these become somewhat forgotten or discredited, or they are confused with mere repetition. Wekua’s oeuvre shows how important they are, how they circle and capture impressions and memories to ultimately build landscapes of the soul.

History plays an important role here—or to put it better: another experience of history and time. 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).

This is Andro Wekua’s largest solo exhibition to date, and includes new sculptures, a current series of portraits, a selection of collages and of older paintings as well as a brand new film. Wekua’s oeuvre possesses a distinctive feeling for both seduction and rejection, it is unabashed and intensive, and it shines with a knowledge of materials, form, and mise-en-scène. His art speaks of the invisible yet omnipresent spaces between before and after that serve to conjure a present, which ultimately is both poetic and political.

Andro Wekua, born 1977 in Sochumi (former Soviet Union), lives and works in Berlin.

On the occasion of All is Fair in Dreams and War, the first comprehensive monograph of Andro Wekua’s work is published: Andro Wekua, with contributions by Daniel Baumann, Pablo Larios, Paulina Pobocha, and Ali Subotnick. Design by Dan Solbach. Kunsthalle Zürich and JRP/Ringier, Zürich, 2018.

Thanks to Gladstone Gallery New York/Brussels and Sprüth Magers.

Kunsthalle Zürich is funded by Stadt Zürich Kultur, Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur and LUMA Foundation.