Is the notoriously silent painter trolling us with vexing pictures of our times?&nbsp;

The good, the bad, and the ugly: Jana Euler’s quiet riot

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The late painter&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/16713/James-Bishop" target="_blank">James Bishop</a> liked to say that artists should never be seen or heard – ‘except, of course, opera singers’.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10076/Jana-Euler" target="_blank">Jana Euler</a>’s large, confrontational, and saturated paintings are a far cry from Bishop’s quiet abstractions, yet she seems to share his attitude. Euler does not give interviews and provides little discursive context for her exhibitions: What she has to say she has already said in her works. The German artist has painted bizarre neckless portraits of artworld figures, such as the curator Daniel Birnbaum and artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6932/Wolfgang-Tillmans" target="_blank">Wolfgang Tillmans</a>, enormous electric plug sockets, sharks that look like penises, and fanciful horned horses she calls Morecorns, which kind of look like penises, too. She makes art that consistently catapults itself into the center of contemporary discourses on pop culture, gender, capitalism, even existentialism. She may be reluctant to put words to her practice but in her works she is the opposite of shy.

Euler’s work is brazen; some would call it ugly. At times it is even grotesque, in a specific aesthetic that has been somewhat difficult for audiences to come to terms with. For many, the now-famous 2019 exhibition ‘Great White Fear’&nbsp;at Berlin’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1547/Galerie-Neu" target="_blank">Galerie Neu</a> of eight three-meter-high paintings of phallic sharks&nbsp;marked an important turning point in the reception of Euler’s work. While certain key elements have long been present in it – a humorous approach to social networks, to the artworld, this mix of crassness and criticality – the shark paintings represent a powerful concentration of them. At a key moment during the #MeToo movement, Euler’s massive beasts flung themselves out of the water as though in a last-ditch effort to assert their dominance, eyes beaming absolute dread. It was also a showcase of painterly virtuosity. Each canvas was painted in a different style – technically and compositionally they were triumphant. And this is what gives Euler’s sly critique its bite: It is as bold as it is hilarious and, crucially, full of pleasure and energy. Although the exhibition’s message was not simple, the meaning of 'Great White Fear'&nbsp;was clear – there was no need to say anything else.

Painting in contemporary art now is characterized by two distinct tendencies, between which it is often difficult to distinguish. After the Zombie Formalism of the mid-2010s, in the past couple of years we have seen the emergence of what Alex Greenberger has called Zombie Figuration and Dean Kissick the new ‘bad figurative painting’.&nbsp;Alongside opportunism and a rather shameless lack of self-consciousness in painting is also the rarefied offshoot of that ‘punky bohemian nihilist mode’ of yore, as Kissick puts it. What began with the three-chord-guitar mode of an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/7393/Albert-Oehlen" target="_blank">Albert Oehlen</a> in the 1980s morphed into&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/53663/Martin-Kippenberger" target="_blank">Martin Kippenberger</a>’s post-studio practice in the 1990s, and eventually the endgame painting of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/6930/Michael-Krebber" target="_blank">Michael Krebber</a>, in whose myth-enveloped Städelschule class Euler studied in the 2000s. And it is within this lineage that we can understand the particular brand of self-consciousness so present in Euler’s work, one that also speaks of how alert she is to painting’s place in the market. This might just be what prompts that particular Eulerian ugliness, as a way of keeping trendiness and style at bay to avoid being held hostage by the expectations of the market. In her recent exhibition at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1148/Greene-Naftali" target="_blank">Greene Naftali</a> in New York City, she took it to the next level: Her Morecorns gallop through kitschy, pastel-colored atmospheres, their horns more marshmallow than ivory, as sprawling and belligerent symbols for queerness, start-up capitalism (in the venture capital industry, ‘unicorn’ describes a privately held start-up company with a value of more than $1 billion USD), and the blundering chase after uniqueness. These are nasty pictures of the times but apt ones. A bold move.

From this self-consciousness it is easy to jump to irony, a game of evasiveness and noncommitment. Is Euler’s work a case of being so bad it’s good, or of winning simply because you can’t hit a moving target? With work that is often meme-like and tongue-in-cheek, is Euler trolling us? Here the artist&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/19595/Mathieu-Malouf" target="_blank">Mathieu Malouf</a> comes to mind. He copied some of her paintings as a kind of joke, a pretty unambiguous form of trolling: aggressive and in your face. But while Euler is certainly in your face, too, her work implicates itself too much to function as a mode of attack, in that it is more complex in its structure, more serious. The source of the complexity is that seriousness takes surprising forms. Shape of painting, summer hit 2017 (2018), for instance, a brutally saccharine portrait of the pop singer Ed Sheeran, stands out as the opposite of evasive. With Sheeran’s glassy eyes and every strand of hair on his face, Euler confronts us with the violent banality of our spectacular society and doesn’t let us look away. It is not a painting of Sheeran per se, but about how icons, people, and paintings can become the leaky vessels of a mass-produced, though no less real, profundity.

The slippery sense of meaning in her paintings, then, might be less addressed to the viewer than to language itself. Put too many words to something – like love, or art – and it stops making sense. Analysemonster (2014) – a dramatically strung-out figure squished into the box of the canvas – is a caricature of the dangers of overthinking, pupils bursting, tongue erect. For Euler, it’s about keeping the energy flowing, not getting stuck, and letting language tie itself into a knot. This is also why her exhibitions don’t have press releases, or she will only write a very minimal ones herself. And she concentrates on one series at a time and never returns to its themes. Less about gaining particular artworld currency – though of course she has that, too – the work bears witness to an artist more preoccupied with playing around, exploring, and challenging herself.&nbsp;

Euler’s latest outing as part of the group show ‘Zeros and Ones’&nbsp;at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin is a demonstration of her thematic agility: Mere months after the Morecorns, her new protagonist is margarine. Hung high between two floors, the large painting From the perspective of the margarine (2021) shows the approach of an electric whisk from the perspective of margarine about to be beaten. KW used to be a margarine factory: Euler takes a context, turns it into a picture, and schemes a spin on it. Here the artist suggests that we are at once the margarine at the bottom of the bowl and the ones holding the mixer. She’s not trolling, only speaking candidly to life’s double binds, whether good, bad, or ugly.<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/10076/Jana-Euler" target="_blank">Jana Euler</a> is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1512/Cabinet" target="_blank">Cabinet</a> (London),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/2445/dépendance" target="_blank">dépendance</a> (Brussels),&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1547/Galerie-Neu" target="_blank">Galerie Neu</a> (Berlin), and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1148/Greene-Naftali" target="_blank">Greene Naftali</a> (New York City). In September, dépendance will present her work at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/basel">Art Basel in Basel</a>.Kristian Vistrup Madsen is a writer, art critic, and curator based in Berlin. His work has been published in magazines such as Artforum, frieze, Mousse, and The White Review. His book Doing Time: Essays on Using People, 2021, is out from Floating Opera Press.&nbsp;Top image: Installation view of 'Jana Euler', Cabinet, London, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Cabinet, London.Middle image: Installation view of Jana Euler's exhibition 'The Traveling Legends of the Morecorns', Greene Naftali, New York City, 2021. Photo by Elisabeth Bernstein.&nbsp;Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York City.Bottom image: Installation view of Jana Euler's&nbsp;From the perspective of the margarine (2021) in the exhibition 'Zeros and Ones' at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2021. Photo by&nbsp;Frank Sperling.&nbsp;

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Is the notoriously silent painter trolling us with vexing pictures of our times? 

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Is the notoriously silent painter trolling us with vexing pictures of our times?

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The good, the bad, and the ugly: Jana Euler’s quiet riot

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