PARIS.- After a two-year absence, unconventional artist Oda Jaune is back, offering a Paris transformed by the pandemic wOnderlust, a powerful, dazzling new exhibition centring on a breath-taking 10-metre-long canvas and a life-sized hologram. The canvases, water colours and hologram together map out a fabulous journey, veering between the magical and the monstrous.
Originally from Bulgaria, Oda Jaune trained in Germany before adopting Paris as her home city. Over the last 10 years she has been one of the most intriguing figures on the European art scene. Her distinctive work, unshackled by convention, is part of the spectacular renaissance of figurative painting in France. Poetic, tortured, sometimes erotic or even unaffectedly feminist, her painting uninhibitedly explores the depths of the unconscious.
The recent health crisis and forced isolation led the artist to reexamine the evolution of the human race and its shifting relationship with the world. As she explains, "After a year of the pandemic, I'm fascinated by the idea of the transformation of human beings and of nature into someone or something that is always new." The exhibition's central canvas is over 10 metres long, unfurling along the trunk of a metamorphosing tree populated by children, the world's last survivors, engaged in enigmatic activities.
The gallery basement is home to Oda Jaune's first incursion into the world of holograms. Part painting, part sculpture, the installation reveals a "tree of life" projected into the dark.
Born in 1979 in Bulgaria, Oda Jaune has lived and worked in Paris since 2008. Her work has featured in in a variety of exhibitions in Europe, including Heart – Romanticism in Contemporary Art, Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris (2020), Hands – Solo Show, SEEN, Antwerp (2019), Peindre, dit-elle, chap. 2, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dôle (2017), Intrigantes incertitudes, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Saint-Etienne (2016), Peindre, dit-elle, Musée Départemental d'Art Contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, Rochechouart (2015), Confrontation avec Félicien Rops, Musée Félicien Rops, Namur (2011) and Tous cannibales, La Maison Rouge, Paris and me Collectors room, Berlin (2011). In 2018, the National Art Gallery in Sofia held a major retrospective of her work, Heartland, The exhibition included a catalogue published in September 2019 by Hatje Cantz.
