What is it that underpins human freedom? Why do humans keep striving to surpass themselves? Why are they never satisfied with what they are? Oda Jaune is back at Galerie Templon this autumn with a brand-new series of oil paintings where these questions are given flesh. The artist, focusing on her figures, creates works with no predefined orientation so they can be hung any way up, as though unbound by gravity. The interpretation changes depending on how the painting is hung. During the exhibition in November, the works will be turned upside down, revealing new narratives and new interpretations. The artist will also be creating a mural piece in dialogue with the fourteen paintings and occupying the space with her surprising and flamboyant anthropomorphic sculptures.

With this new series of works, Oda Jaune is observing the human being, a creature constantly seeking to push the body's biological and physical boundaries further, willing to experiment with everything and anything even at the risk of their own life and the life of the planet. Will the next stage in human evolution be dematerialisation? A soul liberated from its fleshly envelope with no more limits? The mutant figures who populate this new series, freed from earthly shackles, float in the blue of a cloud-flecked sky or emerge from the black depths of the night. The artist's touch is smooth, meticulous and luminous, giving bodily form to the visions that inhabit her, visions that metamorphise the female body and give a central role in art to the question of women's creative power.

Born in 1979 in Bulgaria, Oda Jaune lives and works in Paris. Over the last ten years she has developed a distinctive and unusual poetic visual language redolent of surrealism and morphing. Oda Jaune's work has featured in a variety of exhibitions in Europe and the USA, including Peindre, dit-elle, chap. 2, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dôle (2017), Intrigantes incertitudes, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Saint-Etienne (2016), Peindre, dit-elle, Musée Départemental d'Art Contemporain de Rochechouart (2015), Confrontation avec Félicien Rops, Musée Rops de Namur (2011), and Tous cannibales, La Maison Rouge, Paris and me Collectors room, Berlin (2011). In 2018, the National Art Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria, held a major retrospective of her work, Heartland, with a catalogue published in September 2019 by Hatje Cantz.

Press release courtesy Templon.