Posted on
2019-11-04
Known for the multidisciplinary nature of his practice, Wekua has created a series of paintings and sculptures that continue his career-long exploration of the liminal space between objectivity and subjective interpretation. In works that are redolent with the artifacts of an ambiguous and undefined history, Wekua presents a series of tableaux that reveal themselves to us as emotionally familiar in spite of the artist’s gestures of obfuscation and his conscious disavowal of the formal tropes of narrative.
Using collage and assemblage as metaphors for the cognitive machinations that transform lived experience into reflection, the exhibition features a group of paintings that redeploy imagery recurrent throughout Wekua’s oeuvre. Silkscreened onto aluminum and subsequently overpainted—often gilded with silver leaf—images of palm fronds, photographic portraits, dolphins, and sections of wrought iron fence present themselves as sites of contemplation analogous to traditional icons. The artist’s continual reconfiguration of the images that define his visual lexicon indicates a compulsion to reorder the past in a search for alternative outcomes, in spite of the futility of ever finding satisfaction.
Opposite – Paging Me, 2019
Exhibition runs through to December 21st, 2019
Gladstone Gallery
515 West 24th Street
NY-10011
New York
www.gladstonegallery.com
