Jana Euler

Oil on canvas
39 3/8 x 32 1/4 inches (100 x 82 cm)
Photo: Elisabeth Bernstein

I’d identify Euler’s [irony] as critical or constructive. It is meant to articulate something, to reveal a structure.
—Fabrice Stroun

Born in Friedberg, Germany in 1982, Jana Euler studied art at the Städelschule Frankfurt am Main and the Glasgow School of Art. Over the past decade, Euler has refined a practice spanning an eclectic range of stylistic approaches to investigate the possibilities of a work’s dissemination, consumption, and reception, as exemplified by recent exhibitions at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2017) and Artists Space, New York (2020). Deliberately evasive, her often humorous approach to figuration leaves space for an array of interpretive possibilities.

The present work, Green (2013), features a monochromatic nude unnaturally stretched out to follow the confines of the canvas, a compositional device Euler has employed to this day, as seen in her recent paintings Close Rotation (Right) and Close Rotation (Left), (both 2019) shown at Artists Space. Here, Euler rhymes personhood with painting, ultimately discrediting either as solid, unchanging entities, and instead proposing a more flexible approach to identification as each goes on to inhabit new contexts.