黑料不打烊

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Georgian artist Andro Wekua. Utilizing art-historical subject matter such as floral still lifes, reclining figures, and portraiture, Wekua imbues his works with a layered psychology that joins the past with the complexities of individual experience. In these paintings, the artist examines the liminal space between individual subjectivity and universal understanding, using imagery, process, and formal strategy to craft a charged emotional landscape. The artist's collage-like surfaces recall Modernist pictorial construction while remaining firmly rooted in a contemporary sensibility, resulting in images that are both urgent and timeless. Eschewing the strictures of formal tradition and the confines of narrative, Wekua's work exists in a half-light, a psychic geography where the past skids against the present.

Rendered in richly pigmented layers of oil and charcoal on linen, the works in this exhibition depict attenuated blooms and enigmatic figures oscillating between abstraction and figuration. Wekua's subjects seem to emerge as if excavated from the medium itself, appearing from within an ether of layered paint application. His generalized sitters evoke a mysterious power and emotion, while roses, fruit, and tablescapes subtly subvert a lineage of European genre painting, playing on ideas of beauty and legibility. Each work evades easy categorization by virtue of its construction; oblique, geometric mark-making and passages of shifting opacity and luminous translucency create a slippage between familiar forms and new ones. Claiming territory between the observed and the imagined, Wekua's paintings invite reconsideration of how images are constructed and of the emotional and historical implications they carry.