Oda Jaune
All White
Oda Jaune will be showing her porcelain sculptures for the very first time, unveiling the results of an artistic practice she has been experimenting with since 2016. These previously unseen pieces will be exhibited alongside a dozen new paintings to create a complex ensemble that reinterprets and reworks the themes that obsess the artist: the body as the terrain for metamorphosis, and the emanations of the subconscious.
Her distinctive universe draws on poetry, film and media culture and the history of art, revolving around “everything that should not be said about the inner and the outer world.” As a painter, Oda Jaune makes use of contemporary images to lift the social masks that people wear and explore the views – forgotten, censured, desired – they conceal. The artist’s choice of unexpected associations liberates her both from artistic traditions and autobiography.
As a sculptress, she works with the delicacy of bisque porcelain to produce the sensual effect of flesh and the ‘infinite undulations’2 that so fascinated Auguste Rodin. In an interplay of white with ‘cloud, shadow and light’, the artist disconcerts with her fragments of metamorphosed bodies that produce ‘secret scenes’ in the tradition of Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeois.
Untitled, 2016
The artist
Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1979, Oda Jaune studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf before developing an interdisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture and installation. She lives and works between London, Paris and Bulgaria.
Oda Jaune’s work is driven by a sustained inquiry into the instability of reality and the transformative potential of form. Rather than representing the visible world, she constructs new modes of existence in which the distinctions between body and object, organic and artificial, attraction and disquiet cease to remain fixed. Her works propose an expanded anatomy of life, where objects acquire corporeality, bodies dissolve into landscapes, and unfamiliar organisms emerge with an uncanny sense of intimacy.
While painting remains central to her practice, sculpture has become an increasingly significant field of investigation. Working with materials including bronze, ceramic and blown glass, Jaune explores the physical and metaphysical capacities of matter itself.
Without belonging to any single movement or tradition, Oda Jaune has developed a singular visual language in which beauty and estrangement coexist, and where imagination functions not as an escape from reality but as a means of generating new realities.
