Jonathan Edelhuber
Quarantine Skulls

November 8 to December 6, 2020

Ampersand is pleased to present Quarantine Skulls, an exhibition of new paintings by Jonathan Edelhuber. As the title suggests, the works are among a series of ongoing paintings that Edelhuber started making as the world collectively entered isolation in response to COVID-19. The skull is usually a signifier of death and the unknown, a loaded image that pervades the history of human imagery, yet has no fixed definition of what it aims to represent. It’s an object that has been drawn, tattooed, sculpted and painted with such regularity that it seems beyond a state of familiarity. But Edelhuber's take feels fresh and charged with vitality. "Death was all around," he says, "but I wanted to feel alive. I wanted to take an image that is usually associated with death and make it full of life, to change this icon of being dead into what it means to be human—lively, happy, excited." His skulls look at us with a knowing smile, with an expression of wide-eyed optimism. Edelhuber likens their form to a new landscape into which he could escape while being stuck at home, forced to isolate from everything outside. As viewers, we enter his world of dynamic color, texture and material, and though the shape in each case is essentially the same, these varied elements of composition portray or evoke a wide range of emotion. The skulls, he says, became his freedom from the weight of quarantine. "A reminder of what it is to be human. To be alive."

Jonathan Edelhuber lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee. His paintings and sculptures have been widely exhibited in group and solo exhibitions. This is his first exhibition at Ampersand.

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