Friday, May 06, 2011

BOOKS: Amazing Catalogs by Andro Wekua. (lespressesdureel.com)

more here: lespressesdureel.com

Lady Luck: Viewing the past as a spiral of infinite reoccurrence, Andro Wekua creates enigmatic tableaux questioning the intersections of history, memory, and fantasy. In the new paintings and collages included in this book, Wekua explores history as a chain of repeating events and emotions, that both heightens a sense of disassociation even as it sustains one's inner-life.

Many elements of Wekua's formal language reappear throughout the various media he employs. Images that could be family snapshots or advertisements haunt the base layers of his collages as the artist's hand drowns them in color, traces attenuated facial features, and obliterates the composition with interlocking geometric shapes. The question lingers whether what is buried is lost, or purposefully hidden. Out of these collages emerge not just recurring images but also the basic formal grammar of Wekua's visual world. The publication with a fine binding includes texts by the artist.

It follows the first monograph published by JRPRingier in 2006 (If There Ever Was One), and two artist's books published by Nieves: Shadows on the Facade (paintings/collages, 2007) and No one was there, she did not know it (drawings, 2005).Andro Wekua, born in 1977 in Georgia, currently lives and works in Switzerland. He has been depicted as a master of suggestion, of small gestures. His narrative structures are deadly focused on their targets, yet remain astonishingly open. Wekua locates his drawn, collaged or sculptural images in a No-Man's Land between East and West, aesthetic exactness and improvisation, confidence and melancholy. He creates his own highly visual scripts which play with his past and stylize it into fiction.

See also
Boris Groys & Andro Wekua

Texts by Andro Wekua.
Published with Gladstone Gallery. 2008
English edition21 x 28 cm (hardcover)
72 pages (30 color ill.)
25 €

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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.Also available: No one was there, she did not know it (drawings).Andro Wekua, born in 1977 in Georgia, currently lives and works in Switzerland. He has been depicted as a master of suggestion, of small gestures. His narrative structures are deadly focused on their targets, yet remain astonishingly open. Wekua locates his drawn, collaged or sculptural images in a No-Man's Land between East and West, aesthetic exactness and improvisation, confidence and melancholy. He creates his own highly visual scripts which play with his past and stylize it into fiction.

See also
Boris Groys & Andro Wekua

Texts by Dieter Schwarz and Rein Wolfs.
Published with the Kunstmuseum Winterthur.
2006
bilingual edition (English / German)
25 x 28,6 cm (hardcover)
208 pages (55 colour ill., 55 b/w ill.)
ISBN: 978-3-905701-86-9EAN: 9783905701869

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