Jana Euler’s work bounds between stylistic conceits, trafficking in grotesque, monstrous, contorted, eroticised, and frequently off-putting representations of figures, both human and not. Aping the jokey, anarchist attitude, surrealist fixations, and twinned scepticism and faith in the field of painting characterised by German artists of the post-war period, Euler marries their radical gestures with savage satires of the human condition. In the artist’s work, the body is frequently displayed in positions of cartoonish, abject carnality or discomfiting vulnerability. Euler’s exaggerated bodies also appear in the form of animals. In her series great white fear (2019–2021), she presents paintings of sharks that call to mind the variably Hyperrealist, Abstract, and Surrealist techniques of famous male painters. For the 59th International Art Exhibition, Euler places on a plinth 111 ceramic shark sculptures, whose diminutive size forms a counterpoint to the animal’s epic proportions in great white fear. Instead, flies – one, Fly (eternity) (2021), a 500-year-old specimen preserved in amber, the other, Fly (moment) (2021), living and captured in extreme close-up macro photography – eclipse the sharks, in two theatrically scaled paintings. Staging an impossible encounter between the dead and the alive, the big and small, the flying and sea-bound, Euler, again, renders the familiar enigmatic.
Madeline Weisburg
