Andro Wekua

9 June 2018 to 5 August 2018
Kunsthalle Zürich
Limmatstrasse 270
Zurich
CH-8005
Switzerland
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Critic's Guide: Zurich

Before he moved to Berlin, Andro Wekua was a Zurich resident, so this show is a homecoming of sorts. When Bice Curiger, then curator at the Kunsthaus Zürich, included his work in her 2011 Venice Biennale, it was in the form of an architectural model. Wekua was born in Sokhumi, a city on the Black Sea, in a country (the USSR) that no longer exists and now in a state few countries recognize (Abkhazia). It was there that his father, a political activist, was assassinated, and soon after his family left the country. Wekua imagines Sokhumi, remembers it or invents it, from afar. It’s one of several motifs he returns to repeatedly, and his almost retrospective show at the Kunsthalle should illustrate how this repetition and circling around a subject evolves over time. Mannequins are another such subject, absent faces and erased features, and wolves. There will be paintings and video work too. An untitled sculpture, which has just been displayed at the Garage Museum in Moscow in a solo exhibition there, is a black wolf nosing the back of a small silver girl. It is charged with the darkness of Wekua’s oeuvre, his uneasy, uncanny aesthetic – and is a riposte to the kitsch monstrosity of the ‘Fearless Girl’ who faces off Wall Street’s charging bull. 

- Aoife Rosenmeyer

Read the full Critic's Guide to Zurich here.

Location

Kunsthalle Zürich


Limmatstrasse 270
Zurich
CH-8005
Switzerland