Andro Wekua’s Artworks Displayed in Germany

One of Germany’s oldest museums, the Koelnischer Kunstverein, is hosting a two-month exhibition of unique works by Georgian contemporary artist Andro Wekua. The artist presented his already famous life-size figurine made in 2014 along with other works created in different periods. The ‘Anruf’ (‘Call’) exhibition opened at the Museum on April 15 and will remain open until June 19.

Wekua’s works occupy the main exhibition hall at the Museum and as organizers said, “transport viewers into a dream-like world”. The central object – a human body - hangs from the ceiling in a prominent location and appears as a half androgynous human and half robot. The being is balanced on its chin atop a swing-like apparatus and is thus depicted in a physically impossible position, which further intensifies its already very striking strangeness and unworldliness.

The exhibition also includes an untitled painting of a seascape (2016), which is placed at a significant distance opposite the figure, but includes completely different traditions, being more in common with 19th-century British and French landscape paintings as well as their expressively conceived early 20th-century pendants. His works typically display a disturbing and uncanny quality and point to subconscious processes.

This can be most clearly seen in Wekua’s cinematic works, and the ‘Call’ exhibition includes video-works produced from 2003-2012. “These works are partly based on found material and partly on sequences produced by the artist himself, and they oscillate between the genres of historical documentary, horror and science fiction. The films present images between memory, dream and vision and convey an atmosphere that is no less adept at getting under viewers’ skin,” organizers say.

The exhibition at the Kolnischer Kunstverein is not only the artist’s first major presentation in Europe but the first significantly comprehensive presentation in Germany in the last five years. Previously, Wekua presented his works in Castello di Rivoli in Italy, at the Camden Arts Centre in the United Kingdom, at Boijmans van Beuningen in the Netherlands as well as in different art spaces in Germany.

Nominated for the Preis der Nationalgalerie Award in 2011 Andro Wekua was born in 1977 and grew up amidst the ethnic conflict in Georgia’s breakaway Abkhazia in the 1990s. Now the artist lives in Germany and Switzerland.

Eka Karsaulidze