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.”