Oda Jaune
wOnderlust
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.
Mother earth
The artist
Born in 1979 in Sofia, Bulgaria, Oda Jaune lives and works in London. The artist uses her work to portray a tormented yet deeply poetical world. In it, images that are tender, naive and violent, occasionally erotic and funny, are mingled together as Jaune continues her frank exploration of a subconscious freed from convention. Her paintings are unsettling, putting the viewer in a position where abandon is the only option and inhibition is futile.
