Gladstone Gallery (24th Street)
515 West 24th Street, 212-206-9300
Chelsea
March 1 - March 29, 2008
Reception: Friday, February 29, 5:30 - 7:30 PM
Web Site
The melancholy nostalgia of the displaced haunts the sculpture, paintings, collage, and film of Georgian artist Andro Wekua. While the political narratives of the civil war in his homeland underscore and contextualize his work, it is an enigmatic autobiography that structures Wekua’s visual vocabulary. A solitary child—a boy at different ages and states of undress—continually inhabits these installations; his color streaked eyes and cheeks, quite literary make him shamefaced. In seeming to plumb his own estranged engagement with the past, Wekua betrays the exuberant colors and fantastic vignettes as tinseled disguises for an embedded autobiography, surfacing only in gem-like reflections.