Oda Jaune
Mudima Foundation, MILANO
Traps between sensuality and alienation. The artist has created for the event 10 new works on canvas and twenty drawings, plus a large vertical diptych. The bodies that seem to float in the air and the use of classic gimmicks like anamorphosis and hypertrophy suggest the sixteenth century Mannerism.

The Mudima Foundation presents from May 9 to June 8 the first solo of Oda Jaune in Milan.
Oda Jaune is one of the most interesting artists of the new generation in Germany. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1979, he attended the courses of Prof. Jörg Immendorff Academy in Düsseldorf, where he lives and works for years now. The young Bulgarian artist created for the event ten new works on canvas and twenty drawings, plus a large vertical diptych of 4.80 m x 4:40 m.
Oda Jaune began painting as a child, prompted by the creative climate that reigns in the family. The father, a graphic designer, and her sister, also an artist, instead of telling the tales show images of masterpieces of the past and the present, explaining how many things you can do with color or with a sign. Together they travel a lot and every year go to Rome in a devout pilgrimage to the classical masterpieces of the Vatican Museums: there Oda learn to appreciate the Italian painting. Then returning home, at that Bulgarian landscape immersed in nature and nostalgia that always emerges in his work, the memory of a particularly happy time.
His paintings are all strictly untitled because the artist wants to leave us free to interpret their strange figures and situations to the limit of paradox. The bodies that seem to float in the air and the use of classic gimmicks like anamorphosis and hypertrophy suggest the sixteenth century mannerism, style that Oda continues to study and deepen. Magritte's surrealism is another starting point, with painting that is more analytical and detailed and the characters that emerge from dreamlike and magical countryside as if they've come there by chance, in an unreal light which refers to the metaphysical de chirichiana and romanticism of Böcklin.
Yet Oda is certainly not an artist of classical citations. Most of subjects are in fact the photographic matrix inspired by his snapshots or images taken from magazines or the Internet. The recurring theme in his work is the mask, to enhance the theatricality of paint and play with the ambiguity. We do not know if what we see are people or animals, men or women. But we still find ourselves beyond reality.
Seductive and disturbing, the works of Oda, as she herself acknowledges, aspiring to be traps for those who observe them.
The catalog of the exhibition is curated by Achille Bonito Oliva.
Opening Tuesday, May 8th, 18:30
The artist will attend the opening.