Oda Jaune
Blue Skies
Bulgarian artist Oda Jaune is returning to Galerie Templon for the first time in five years with a major exhibition of paintings. Blue Skies, featuring a series of brand new works, is dedicated to the idea of the possible and the imagination, the title chosen for the resolutely optimistic vision it conveys, a vision liberated from practical conventions.
The exhibition reveals the artist’s obsessions, which she subjects to a constant process of change and reinvention by means of unexpected associations and formulations. Her distinctive universe draws on poetry, film and media culture, the history of art and her own history and is drawn to ‘everything that should not be said about the inner and the outer world.’ (A. Berland.) Oda Jaune uses paint to appropriate contemporary cultural images and unashamedly explore the images that lurk in the subconscious. She refuses labels, seeking rather to free herself from both artistic traditions and autobiography.
To mark the exhibition, the gallery publishes a bilingual catalogue (English and French) on Oda Jaune with a text by Alain Berland.
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.
