At the Brussels space of Galerie Templon, Oda Jaune will be showing her porcelain sculptures for the very first time in the exhibition, “All White”, unveiling the results of an artistic practice she has been experimenting with since 2016. These previously unseen pieces will be exhibited alongside a dozen new paintings to create a complex ensemble that reinterprets and reworks the themes that obsess the artist: the body as the terrain for metamorphosis, and the emanations of the subconscious.

 

Her distinctive universe draws on poetry, film and media culture and the history of art, revolving around ‘everything that should not be said about the inner and the outer world.’[1]

As a painter, Oda Jaune makes use of contemporary images to lift the social masks that people wear and explore the views – forgotten, censured, desired – they conceal. The artist’s choice of unexpected associations liberates her both from artistic traditions and autobiography.

 

As a sculptress, she works with the delicacy of bisque porcelain to produce the sensual effect of flesh and the ‘infinite undulations’[2] that so fascinated Auguste Rodin. In an interplay of white with ‘cloud, shadow and light’, the artist disconcerts with her fragments of metamorphosed bodies that produce ‘secret scenes’ in the tradition of Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeois.

 

Born in 1979 in Bulgaria, Oda Jaune attended the Fine Arts Academy in Düsseldorf, where she studied under the painter Jörg Immendorff. She went to live in Paris in 2008, moving away from the German tradition to develop her own highly personal style and oeuvre.

 

Recent exhibitions of her works include Tous cannibales at the Maison Rouge in Paris and Me Collectors Room in Berlin (2011), Confrontation avec Félicien Rops at the Musée Rops in Namur (2011), and Peindre, dit-elle at the Musée départemental d'art contemporain de Rochechouart (2015) and currently at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dôle (until 28 May 2017). White Sculptures, a book dedicated to her sculptures with texts by Olivier Kaeppelin, will be published by Hatje Kantz in May 2017.

 

[1] Alain Berland, Blue Skies, Galerie Templon, 2016

[1] Olivier Kaeppelin, White Bodies, Hatje Kantz, 2017