German-Bulgarian painter Oda Jaune presents a new series of watercolours that examine the idea of the mask.

These new works present ambiguous scenes depicting characters confronting metamorphosis and the interplay of transformation and concealment. From clown to nun, wrestler to mother, in images reminiscent of the cinema or advertising, Jaune questions social masks and the construction of personality.

Mingling visions of tenderness, naïveté and violence, Jaune continues her frank exploration of a subconscious freed from convention.

‘Oda Jaune is like that; she quietly contemplates people, showing the same consideration to pretty girls from magazines as to the deformed, carefully observing flaunted bodies and guarded feelings, applying the same scrupulous examination to all of them, the laser-like curiosity that children have before their minds succumb to prejudice,’ writes Catherine Millet. 

Born in 1979 in Sofia, Bulgaria, Oda Jaune studied at the Dusseldorf academy of fine arts under the painter Jörg Immendorff. She moved to Paris in 2008, a city she finds reflects the tormented yet poetical world she portrays. 

This will be her third exhibition at Galerie Templon since 2009. Notable recent exhibitions of her works include The Bearable Lightness of Being (2008) for the 11th Mostra Internazionale di Architettura in Venice, Tous cannibales at the Maison Rouge in Paris (and the Me Collectors Room in Berlin), Confrontation avec Félicien Rops at the Musée Rops in Namur (2011), and Hybrides at the Fondation Francès in Senlis (2012). A book on the Masks series will be published by Distanz in the summer of 2015. Autumn of the same year will see the publication by Roads of a monograph on the artist by Catherine Millet.