WESR Yo tengo el Espíritu

This exhibition marks thirty years of Danny Figueroa working as Wesr — from his beginnings in the graffiti scene in Lima in 1996 to his life and practice today in Berlin. Over these three decades, Wesr has developed a world of figures, symbols and stories that moves between cultures, places and materials. His practice spans murals, painting, drawing and, more recently, ceramics. The exhibition brings these different parts of Wesr’s practice together: original paintings and drawings alongside a new body of ceramic works, offering the first full presentation of his work in three dimensions. Although the materials and forms change, they share the same visual language. The figures, symbols and ideas that appear in one medium continue to reappear and transform in another. The same characters move between them, sometimes recognisable and sometimes transformed. Many of Wesr’s figures exist somewhere between human, animal and spirit. The mask is a recurring point of departure, informed in part by the masked figures and traditions of the Andes, including the Ukuku. These references have become part of Wesr’s visual vocabulary: a way to explore identity, spirituality, memory, nostalgia and transformation. His figures resist fixed identities. A character may appear as a person, an animal, a spirit or some combination of these, often with different forms and presences occupying the same body. Forms appear within forms, suggesting something emerging, changing or already present beneath the surface. In 2023, after more than a decade largely away from drawing because of tendinitis, Wesr returned to the medium. The return to the line led to a new body of original works shown in Lima and reconnected him with a way of working that had been central to his practice since his early years. Since returning to drawing, it has remained an important part of his work, while the line continues to be a starting point for his paintings, expanding into colour, texture and larger forms. The move into ceramics extends this process into three dimensions. For Wesr, working with clay is part of a need for growth: learning a new technique, finding a new tool for creation and expanding the universe he has been building for years. It also returns to something much earlier. As a child, he made his own toys from clay. Now, decades later, he is using the same act of shaping something with his hands to imagine what his visual world can become in physical space. Figures that previously occupied the surface of a drawing or painting can now take on another body. A character can become a vessel or sculpture; an image can become an object that can be held, used and lived with. This interest in objects was already present in Wesr’s paintings, where vessels and other functional forms appear as early as 2007 and become increasingly prominent around 2024. The ceramics bring this existing interest into physical space, allowing forms that once existed within the paintings to become objects in their own right. There is also a connection to Peru’s long tradition of working with clay. This cultural history forms part of what Wesr carries with him, just as Andean imagery and folklore have entered his visual language and been transformed through his experience. What connects the works in this exhibition is not a particular material or technique, but an ongoing process of transformation. A line can become a figure; a figure can become a painting; a figure from a painting can become an object. The same visual world continues to grow as Wesr finds new ways to give it form. The exhibition brings these different forms together not as separate stages, but as parts of the same evolving practice — one that returns to familiar ideas, images and gestures while continually finding new ways to make them alive.