Oda Jaune

Biography

The passport marked “Gyntiana” was given to her by Jörg Immendorff. That was the name of an imaginary country in a play by Ibsen, a land with no borders where everything is possible. Along with the document came a name: Oda Jaune.

She was born on 13 November 1979 in Sofia, with the name Michaela Danowska. Her father is a graphic artist, and her older sister Joana also studied painting in Düsseldorf. As a teenager Michaela lived in Germany in order to attend school there. At thirteen she spent a year at a Waldorf school in Heidelberg. At seventeen she met Immendorff, one of the best-known German painters of his generation. From 1998 to 2003 she studied in his class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and in 2000 she married him. Immendorff invented the name, at her request: she did not want to work under her real one, because her father and sister already did. Oda, by his explanation, is an Old German word meaning “treasure”, jaune is French for “yellow”, and yellow was Immendorff’s favourite colour.

Her first exhibitions came in the last years of her studies. In 2002 she took part in a group show at Galerie Otto Schweins in Cologne, and in 2003 she was in Beijing for the show “Twenty-Four Living Artists in China”. In the same year she won second prize in the Emprise Art Award competition, and the competition’s exhibition was held at the NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf and at the Museum Baden in Solingen.

In 2004 she had her first solo exhibition, at the Kunsthalle Koblenz. Galerie Davide Di Maggio in Berlin followed (2006) and the Fondazione Mudima in Milan (2007), where the critic Achille Bonito Oliva wrote about her. In 2008 her work was shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale, in the exhibition “The Bearable Lightness of Being – The Metaphor of the Space”.

Immendorff died in 2007, and in 2008 she moved to Paris. Since 2009 she has been represented by Galerie Templon in Paris and Brussels, where she has shown “May You See Rainbows” (2009), “Once in a Blue Moon” (2010), “Masks” (2015) and “Blue Skies” (2016). In 2010 the publisher Hatje Cantz brought out “First Water”, a book of one hundred of her watercolours, with a text by Robert Fleck. A catalogue with an essay by Catherine Millet accompanied the 2009 exhibition. In 2011 she showed in several places at once: at the Musée Félicien Rops in Namur, where her work was set beside the prints of the Belgian artist, and in the group exhibition “Tous cannibales” at La Maison Rouge in Paris and at Me Collectors Room in Berlin. Senlis (2012), Berlin (2013), Rochechouart (2015), Saint-Étienne (2016) and Dole (2017) followed. In 2012 she received the Pierre Cardin Prize in the category “Best Painter”.

Her largest exhibition remains the retrospective “Heartland” at the National Art Gallery in Sofia in 2018. The catalogue was published in September 2019 by Hatje Cantz.

Earlier, in 2016, the director Kamilla Pfeffer made a documentary about her, “Who Is Oda Jaune?”. Those appearing in the film include the German artist Jonathan Meese, the gallery owner Daniel Templon and the actor Lars Eidinger. In 2019 came the exhibitions “Beyond Gravity” at Templon in Paris and “Hands, Seen” in Antwerp.