Andro Wekua: If There Ever Was One

If There Ever Was One is full of collages, in the widest sense of the word: Andro Wekua assembles objects, old and new, discarded and valued, in installations, paintings, drawings, sculptures, videos and texts. His ominous tableaux of childlike figures lost in ceramic landscapes combine a sweet nostalgia for youth with an almost masochistic relish for history's decay. Those kid-doppelgangers harbor a tragic fragility, often signaled by blindness or burns, evoking the displacement of the refugee and internalized angst of those growing up witness to national strife, as Wekua did in Soviet and post-Soviet Georgia. His soulful and enigmatic imagery recreates an abstracted vision of that history, and imagines a refuge. As seen at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York and in the Saatchi Gallery, London, the Rubbell Collection, Miami and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.