Life After Life

Rele Gallery, Los Angeles presents Life After Life, the debut solo exhibition by emerging contemporary Nigerian artist Ameh Egwuh, running from April 10 to May 8, 2021. Drawing its title from psychiatrist Raymond Moody’s 1975 book Life After Life, the exhibition explores the idea of human mortality and the afterlife, presenting death as a liminal and transmutative process of movement between worlds, a performative threshold between disparate but closely connected ways of being.

As a series, the nine paintings in Life After Life share similar monochromatic, geometric backgrounds. The works are brightly colored, dream-like spaces populated with balloons, birds, and clocks, almost dancing around the human body as its primary subject. As composite images with different arrangements of symbols that suggest ascension, rebirth, and the passage of time, the exhibition investigates the complex entanglement of life, death, and the indeterminate chasm that separates them. Perhaps most striking in Life After Life are the varying arrangements of the human figures, demonstrating the impossibility of trapping the experience of the afterlife into a singular moment or process.

Presented as a two-part meditation on death and the afterlife over the course of two exhibitions across different cultures, the works featured in this exhibition explore the inevitable and transcultural reality of an ‘end’ to the passage of life. Challenging images of death as cold, skeletal, frightening forms often met with foreboding, the artist offers a different reality through his paintings. The abyssal unknown, here, becomes generative, meditative, and calm. In Life After Life, Egwuh invites the viewer into intimate dialogue on mortality and transcendence as a way to understand and to improve current realities faced by humans throughout the world.

Image captions (L to R): Ameh Egwuh, Life After Life II, acrylic on canvas, 54 x 60 inches, 2020 / Ameh Egwuh, Life After Life III, acrylic on canvas, 54 x 60 inches, 2020.