Biography of Andro Wekua
The Georgian artist Andro Wekua is concerned with issues of exile and identity in his deeply personal and enigmatic art practice, consisting of painting, installation, sculpture and limited edition multiples. His melancholic, and soulful imagery produces a distinct atmosphere, pervaded with notions of refuge, national strife, and personal history.
Andro Wekua was born in 1977 in Sukhumi, a town on the Black Sea and capital of the Abkhazia region. Since 1990, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Abkhazia has declared independence from Georgia. Sukhumi was subsequently devastated by civil war, leaving the artist and his family participants in the Georgian diaspora unable to return to home. The region’s independence is only recognized on the world stage by Russia, Nicaragua and, Venezuela. This feeling of exile pervades the work of Wekua who now divides his time between Switzerland and Berlin.
Between 1995 and 1999 Andro Wekua studied at the Visual Art School in Basel. Concerning himself with fragmented inaccuracies of memory and the complex shifting of personal history, Wekua creates surreal and often unpalatable tableaux, balancing the tight boundary between reality and the subjectivity and distortion of memory. Macabre and eerily hostile, neither the past nor the present provides sanctuary in the sinister, and often thrilling world of the artist.
In 2008 Andro Wekua had a large exhibition entitled “My Bike and your Swamp” at the Camden Arts Centre in London and in 2014 he had a large solo show at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece entitled “Pink Wave Hunter”.
