The Library
23 February – 26 March 2021
We are pleased to announce Jonathan Edelhuber’s (1984, Arkansas) first solo exhibition at the gallery.
His appropriation work takes shape through two main mediums which are sculpture (wood) and painting (oil, acrylic, charcoal…), to recontextualize a visual universe ranging from modernists to more contemporary references.
The text has a very important place in his compositions – for its aesthetic qualities on the one hand (he is a trained graphic designer) – but, in the same way as images and becoming an image itself, it serves above all his quoting technique.
Jonathan Edelhuber, Still Life With Keith Haring Friends on Art Books and Still Life With Owl on Art Books, 2020
In the series of stacks of art books, one can see how he plays with both the aesthetic juxtaposition of various types of texts, but also with the «stacking» effect of the great classics of art history – names and works combined.
Jonathan Edelhuber qualifies the works in this series of Still Lives, thus emphasizing the operation of assemblage or juxtaposition that he achieves with artistic references, as he would with fruits or symbolic objects.
Perfectly illustrating the idea that nothing is created but everything is transformed, Edelhuber’s figures seem to emerge cleanly from the pile of books, like a kind of mutant born from this stack of influences.
Jonathan Edelhuber, Book Stack N°3, 2020
The 3D compositions also play with the aesthetic codes of ornamentation. By their small size, the game of quotations, and the iconic dimension of the reproduced figures, Edelhuber’s sculptures could also refer to the Museum’s memory. It is then that everything that distances them from it appears more strikingly: the handcrafting and the rough finishing that give a glimpse of the process and the gesture (both physical and conceptual) of the artist, as well as the carnal aura of these Still Lives, emanating from their uniqueness, their troubling presence and their totemic dimension.
2020
Acrylic on canvas
124 x 152 cm / 48 x 60 in.
©Jonathan Edelhuber