Jana Euler (b. 1982, DE) lives and works in Frankfurt and Brussels. Her work stands out for its unconventional aesthetic choices. Variously cohesive or incoherent, it often uses “ugliness” as a visual parameter and refuses any particular style or signature. Euler thus sidesteps the demand for artists to function as ready-made merchandise. Often enough, her works parody the hallmarks of male painting, critically reflecting on the historical and social dimensions of her medium.

Jana Euler (1982, DE), Radieuse, 2016
Oil on canvas
Private collection, London
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Neu, Berlin

Between 1947 and 1952, Le Corbusier constructed L’Unité d’habitation (Cité Radieuse) in Marseille. Conceived as an autonomous ‘living machine’, the housing complex articulated Le Corbusier’s utopian vision of a purist, selfsufficient architecture, wherein every aspect of life had been rationally streamlined. In Radieuse, the German artist Jana Euler contrasts Le Corbusier’s austere architecture with the image of a lazing camel – or are there two? These cute to comical creatures evoke cliché images of Africa and the Middle East. Through this simple juxtaposition, Euler seems to compare the hubris of Le Corbusier’s utopian modernism with that of Europe’s colonial enterprise: Le Corbusier, for example, also collaborated with Benito Mussolini in planning Italy’s colonial settlements in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. But as the building’s orderly planes recede behind the flurry of the camel’s lushly detailed fur, Euler also alludes to the supposed unruliness of the ‘oriental’ other, which held so many modernists – from Picasso to Matisse, Klee to Kandinsky – ever so tightly in its thrall.