ANDRO WEKUA

For his first exhibition with Sprüth Magers, Andro Wekua will transform the London gallery by installing a wall constructed of rough breeze blocks, partially obscuring the view into the space through the large bay window. While from the exterior the blocks will be untreated and exposed, the interior side of the wall will have a smooth white surface as if to disguise it from within, allowing the wall to blend seamlessly into the interior space. Within the gallery, Wekua will suspend from the ceiling a life-sized sculpture of an androgynous adolescent.

Known for his uncanny evocations of architecture and memory through exhibitions that imply a non-linear narrative, Wekua here creates a psychologically charged interior. A figure, at once robotic and lifelike, is isolated in a clean gallery space, behind a forbidding block wall that restricts the view to the outside world. The device from which the figure hangs suggests a playground swing, yet he or she hangs in a physically impossible position. Wekua poses questions about interior and exterior, private and public space, performance and imprisonment, revelling in an ambiguity that serves to provoke the viewer’s imagination.

The exhibition will also feature a group of paintings that combine portraitrature, abstraction and figuration. Whether the characters in the paintings relate to the sculpture is unclear, and Wekua invites us to make our own connections through his work.

Andro Wekua (1977) lives and works in Berlin and New York. Solo exhibitions include Pink Wave Hunter, Benaki Museum, Athens (2014) and Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2011), Never Sleep with a Strawberry in Your Mouth, Kunsthalle Wien (2011), A Neon Shadow, Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2011), Workshop Report, Wiels, Brussels and Museion, Bolzano (2009), My Bike and Your Swamp, Camden Arts Centre, London and De Hallen, Haarlem (2008), and Wait to Wait, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2007). Group shows include INSIDE, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2014), The Human Factor: Uses of the Figure in Contemporary Sculpture, Hayward Gallery, London (2014), A Disagreeable Object, Sculpture Center, New York (2012), ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale (2011), Contemplating the Void, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010), Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2010), Shifting Identities, Kunsthaus Zürich (2008) and Berlin Biennale (2006).

© Andro Wekua Courtesy Sprüth Magers / Gladstone Gallery.

Installation view, Andro Wekua, 'SOME PHEASANTS IN SINGULARITY', Sprüth Magers London, October 14 - November 15, 2014 Photography © Stephen White.