The Chapter books by Rita Ackermann and Andro Wekua unfold as an intimate, ongoing exchange – part correspondence, part visual diary. Through drawings, collages, and fragments of text, the artists build a shared language shaped by memory, distance, and fleeting impressions. Their imagery drifts between figuration and abstraction, layering moments that feel both personal and elusive. Rather than resolving into fixed narratives, the works accumulate and dissolve, creating a restless, poetic atmosphere where meaning remains open, shifting, and deeply evocative.
Working in a diverse array of media, Andro Wekua (born 1977 in Sukhumi, Georgia, lives and works in Switzerland) has developed a visual language grounded in the exploration of human experience through the subtle intersections of individual and pooled memory, personal identity, and history. Drawing on genres such as fantasy, science-fiction, and horror, Wekua creates fantastical and often macabre tableaux, revealing the complex processes of reconstruction and fragmentation that continually inform the personal, social, and fictive experience of remembrance.
Creating pictorial representations of the past to better comprehend and grapple with the present, Wekua meditates on the tenuous boundary between historical reality and the artificial construct of remembering, pointing to the inescapable fact that the past is always distorted by the subjectivity of memory.
New York City based artist Rita Ackerman was born in Budapest in 1968. She studied at the University of Fine Arts in Budapest and The New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture from the years of 1989 to 1992. Ackermann invented images that became instant sensations, perturbing young girls that are now part of the universe of global imagery. Her drawings and paintings between 1993-95 depict compositions of adolescent female figures of clonelike multiples engaging in various self-destructive and hazardous activities. Her early works with their ambiguous presence serve as bridges between high and low culture, just as the myths and folk tales which often serve as merits to Ackermann's compositions. Later, Ackerman would abandon the figure, erasing the very matter of her own work, in a complex layering of visual language oscillating between abstraction and figuration into a subconscious unfolding of form—concealed deeply in the abstraction of the omnipresence.
