Andro Wekua at Gladstone Gallery

Andro Wekua

November 1 – December 21, 2019

515 West 24th Street, New York

On the same block of Chelsea where I once spent a fantastic summer as an unpaid gallery intern is the W. 24th Street location of the infamous Gladstone Gallery. The gallery boasts a stunning roster of artists, from Robert Mapplethorpe to Amy Sillman. This month, I visited the new show by Georgian artist Andro Wekua, known for his multidisciplinary work. The show continues the exploration of liminal space seen throughout Wekua’s oeuvre. He has had previous exhibitions at the 2011 Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museum, and numerous international and US-based galleries and museums.

This show features layered multimedia wall works and three-dimensional cast bronze and nickel silver sculpture. The paintings, featuring techniques like silk-screening and gilding, as well as traditional oil painting, flirt between abstraction and representation, creating a space in between. This is seen in Wings (2019), a painting with oil paint, silver leafing, silkscreen ink, and varnish on aluminum panel. With a blue figure next to wings emerging from a section of silver leaf and a window to the left of them, it simultaneously creates a both tangible and intangible space. Another work with the same media is What You Gonna Do (2019), featuring a silkscreened figure and tongues of flame receding or appearing out of layered paint and silver leaf that brings to mind the haunting early work of Gerhard Richter. 

Other works veer further towards abstraction, such as Diving (2019), which also features oil paint, silkscreen ink, and varnish on an aluminum panel. With its bright blue hues, it creates a flat space which gains some dimensionality through the heavily layered impasto brushstrokes. Here, Wekua layers so profusely as to completely obfuscate any semblance of narrative previously inherent in the discrete parts of the piece. In this presentation, the figure of Wings seemingly stares rightward into the void created in Diving.

My personal favorite work in the show was Slow Singing, Flower Bringing (2019), a bronze and glass amalgam of a fish and sculpture of Eros morphed into one form, at the end of the hallway in the gallery. The room, with its high ceiling and mix of artificial and natural light, adds a dramatic chiaroscuro to a sculpture that is already striking on its own. Eros is interwoven with the fish, and each has a dramatic gaze, with the fish’s translucent bright red milled glass eyes and Eros’ haunting white glass eyes with a single slit for each pupil. Dangling from the top of the sculpture is an arrangement of realistically painted bronze flowers. 

Similarly, the other sculpture in the show, Us (2019), consisting of bronze and nickel silver, features a palm frond (a motif seen in other works in Wekua’s oeuvre), and a silver androgynous child figure without arms, propped up by a bronze dolphin with its head seemingly below ground. The arrangement brings to mind the ancient Roman copies of Greek sculptures propped up by inanimate objects and echoes the omnipresent layers in the canvases of the show. The sculpture of the child continues the circular gaze in the space, staring at the Wings figure.

The space itself is well suited to the curation, allowing a nice interplay of natural and artificial light to illuminate the works. Furthermore, the capacious gallery gives the dense pieces space to breathe and allows for contemplation by the viewer. The show will be on view at Gladstone’s W. 24th gallery location through December 21.