Oda Jaune is known for her fearless, large-scale portrayals of fantastical bodies. In both painting and sculpture these bodies are immediate, at once social and biological entities. Jaune has now realised a series of corporeal imaginings, highly personal chairs, stools and tables: useful objects from useless human forms. The unique pieces are made in various materials, painted in a variety of media and will ultimately be cast in bronze in an edition of three, though the works seen here are the sculptural prototypes. It is a figurative metamorphosis – her paintings become spatial, her sculptures become paintings.

For her artist’s book Sculptures, Jaune first imagined her objects might be photographed as if they were furnishings in catalogues that would show people sitting on and using them. Then creative director Beda Achermann, a pivotal figure in the world of publishing and art, brought the artist together with photographer Camille Vivier. These sculptures are the objects that now inspire Vivier, a fashion photographer whose explorations of the female nude have equally garnered an art following. Jaune’s sculptures are props for Vivier with which female models interact. As Jaune and Vivier work together in the studio, sculptural bodies in flux and human bodies are fixed, united in a photograph. Gestures are imitated and echoed; plastic forms are complemented and completed. Vivier often employs a single light source to create stark shadows. The illumination, reminiscent of Surrealist photographers, emphasises the qualities shared by sculpture and model, whilst also illustrating nuances of texture and weight. In this combination the mechanics and structures of bodies, whether real or imagined, mobile or static, are poetically made evident. 

Oda Jaune (born in 1979 in Bulgaria) lives and works in Paris. Over the last ten years she has developed a distinctive and unusual poetic visual language redolent of surrealism and morphing. Oda Jaune's work has featured in a variety of exhibitions in Europe and the USA. Sculptures is her first book with Kodoji Press.