Andro Wekua’s Hazy, Evocative Paintings Reflect the Artist’s Search for Self
Andro Wekua, In Yellow, 2023. © Andro Wekua. Photo byTimo Ohler. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.
Against a sky-blue backdrop layered with patches of marshmallow pink and white, a series of blocky shapes appear: buildings maybe, or trees. Their outlines are carved into the painted surface, like in a hollow relief. A couple of them are colored in, with streaks of red and magenta. The overall impression is of an indistinct landscape glimpsed through smog, or the mists of time. This, the titular painting in Andro Wekua’s new exhibition at Sprüth Magers in London, “There,” took the artist 10 years to finish.
“I started it in 2013; it was more of an abstract painting,” Wekua said in an interview with Artsy ahead of the opening of the show, which runs through July 29th. “I used to have a view from a balcony of the Black Sea, and whenever I would paint anything abstract it had this horizontal format, like the view. So this was an abstract Black Sea painting. I framed it but never showed it. And then one day I took it out again and I just painted over the frame, over the painting, everything. Then it became more like flowers.”
Portrait of Andro Wekua by Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers.
Although he is generally open and engaged in conversation, it’s not easy for Wekua to talk about the precise meaning of his works—in this show, primarily paintings and a couple of drawings, although over the past two-and-a-half decades he has exhibited sculptures, installation, and films too. (His work is held in public and private institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf.) From his perspective, everything he wants to communicate is there in the finished pieces, the moody fields of color and scratchy forms, some more clearly representational than others. But he does offer verbal clues with his titles, such as There; That Rose; That Portrait. There’s a strong sense of spatial specificity, even if the exact location is withheld.
“I do feel like there is a specific place, and all the paintings are in that same place, but I don’t know how to communicate about it in words,” he said. “It sounds cliché, but it’s like I have a big backpack, and I can carry this place with me anywhere.” When pressed, he seemed to hint that it was a memory of somewhere. “It’s not just a geography, it’s also a time and an emotion. If you took those elements apart, they wouldn’t work.”
Now based in Berlin, Wekua was born in 1977 in Sukhumi, a city on the east coast of the Black Sea in Georgia. In the 1990s, Abkhaz separatists, supported by Russian armed forces, waged a war in the region to establish an independent state, with Sukhumi as the capital. In an officially recognized campaign of ethnic cleansing, thousands of Georgians were murdered or forcibly displaced. Wekua’s father, a Georgian political activist, had been killed during the Sukhumi riots of 1989. “I left my city when I was a teenager and I haven’t been able to return since,” Wekua told me.
Understandably, his personal experience of Russian military occupation means that he is extremely preoccupied with the current war in Ukraine; since the invasion last year, he has found himself obsessively reading the news. And if he’s reluctant to draw a direct line between his biography and his work, he admits the relevance of his coming from “this place that’s abstract now, and I can’t get there, but there are other things I can do with it.” In past exhibitions, the artist has literally built models of his childhood home, leaving blank spaces for the parts he can’t remember. Perhaps the canvases and drawings in “There,” hazy yet evocative, serve a similar function.
Like memories, these pictures are palimpsests: often formed in multiple stages, spanning months or years, gradually evolving with the accretion of oil, charcoal, chalk, and other pigments. “I don’t want to say it’s unconscious,” Wekua said of his process, “but it is, more or less.” Each piece starts “somewhere which is connected to me” and from that spark of inspiration he tries “to figure out what’s happening,” as opposed to executing a planned image. Even his depictions of human faces are emphatically not about achieving a likeness of a particular individual: “They’re so close to myself, they’re actually self-portraits.”
Any artistic influences are similarly operating on a subliminal level. Wekua speculated that his elongated, mask-like faces, for instance, might have some connection to the visual culture of his home country, to the iconic tradition of Byzantine and Georgian art. But then he rowed back: “I don’t know. I have no idea. I love great art and I look at it all the time, but I’ve never painted a painting which already exists.”
One thing that’s certain is that over the past few years—since COVID—Wekua has noticed a shift in his practice, which is reflected in the selection of pieces in the exhibition at Sprüth Magers. At first, it was a matter of necessity: Everyone was working from home, so there was no way to produce the large-scale cast sculptures and experimental films which had until then formed a significant part of his oeuvre. But then, Wekua realized that with all this painting and sketching, and being the only person involved in the making of his art, “I somehow came closer to myself. I had direct access to what I was communicating.”
While for other artists, this might seem like scaling back in terms of ambition, for Wekua it’s a purification of his creative project. He first started drawing at the age of 11 or so, because he “needed to visualize things to understand.” Happily, a friend of his father’s was an artist with a studio where the young Wekua was invited to come and paint alongside him every week (that’s where he encountered that view of the Black Sea). Since then, there have been art schools and prizes, gallery and museum exhibitions, but Wekua still sees his work, fundamentally, as a way of making sense of his place in the world. And if there is anything he’s learned, it’s that no one can do that for you but yourself.
