Oda Jaune
May You See Rainbows
For the first time in France, Galerie Daniel Templon exhibits the very young German painter Oda Jaune. At only 29, the Bulgarian-born artist, has developed a unique world, which intersects in a dreamlike atmosphere, surrealistic influences, retro iconography, socialist realism, reminiscences of Hollywood, advertisements or short news items.
Born in 1979 in Sofia, Oda Jaune moved as a teenager to Germany. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, where she was a student of the painter Jörg Immendorff. Her very personal and unusually mature work explores a strange world where people, objects, unidentified shapes move in both poetic and disturbing scenes.
An ambiguous organ – a heart, a piece of flesh or a tongue – regularly makes an unexpected appearance, confirming an impression of both sensuality and strangeness, bordering on the fantastic. “When Jaune creates works with anthropomorphic forms, she builds a formal symbiosis between Man and nature that allows (…) a visible flow between the organic forms of nature and the cultural ones represented by Man, by his instruments, whether for war or work, ” as art critic Achille Bonito Oliva explains.
The artist builds her painting as a film script, but in the manner of the old masters, between Baroque and Mannerism. The themes are borrowed from her neighborhood: memories, readings, images seen on the Internet. Without inhibition, she takes in her most intimate experience compositions that move freely according to her imagination. As she explains: “It doesn’t matter where the motifs come from, but rather what they become.”
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.
