Jana Euler: Art and Commerce

Jana Euler, installation view, “The center does not fold”, Greene Naftali, New York. Left: “Where the energy comes from, connected”, acrylic on canvas, 112 1/2 x 69 inches; Right: “Creative Act (Camera)”, oil on canvas, 78 3/4 x 142 inches (both 2025). Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Júlia Standovár.  

By EDWARD WAISNIS January 2, 2026

There are days the world lies, and days it tells the truth.
–Albert Camus
 

Jana Euler’s confabulations lean in, exposing glimpses of concrete temporality. However, by and large, the work dwells in a trance world accomplished with the use of the age old technology of paint on canvas, creating mind-altering phantasmagorias redolent of hallucinations. It is pertinent to note that that term has now come to be associated with rogue results spewed from digital platforms, resulting in slop, rather than the mind alterations it was exclusively associated with pre-digital dominance.

The artist composed tone poem that serves as press release offers informed asides cognizant of the vastness of the work’s range. Euler’s work relates to other leading painters who work with eclecticism. But the roots of Euler’s motivations can be found in a brood of European predecessors. From Francis Picabia to Sigmar Polke, with a range of supporting players from René Daniëls to Albert Oehlen, providing historical touch points.

An exhaustively assembled, and designed (it is primarily an artist driven endeavor; in some sense an ‘artist’s book) monograph, Exhibitionism, published by a consortium of galleries representing the artist and distributed by Verlag der Buchhandlung, Walter und Franz König, Cologne* is an indispensable tome, affording exploration of Euler’s practice in depth–though, in her opening statement to the book, Euler dispels any such claim.

Navigating the runway that is the galleries entrance put one in direct confrontation with Where the energy comes from, connected (all works are from 2025) a monumental near photo-realist rendering of the electrical outlet situated opposite, behind the gallery desk. Inanimate object as personage emerges, with the inducement of the brain quirk known as pareidolia, prompting a face built from the slits of the plug insertions. It also presents opportunity to contemplate the source of power so important to our age of communication dependent on the ether. As the monograph attests, this is one of a panoply of subjects Euler returns to repeatedly. Worthy of Dominic Gnoli’s gargantuan memorializations of household objects, there are also hints towards Minimalism.

Hanging adjacent, Creative Act (Camera), a reworking (in Euler’s words: a recurrence)† of an earlier painting–Camera becoming painting of 2024–that focused on the front portion of the subject, whereas this work probes the rear, thereby putting the viewer in that exacting position.

This concept-heavy introduction leads into the inner sanctum of the main gallery, where saccharine hues butt up against the pseudo-grisaille of a suite of paintings of U.S. currency.

Jana Euler, installation view, “The center does not fold”, Greene Naftali, New York, 2025. From left to right: “Unfolded Dollar 5”; “Unfolded Dollar 4”: “Unfolded Dollar 1”; “Unfolded Dollar 2”; “Unfolded Dollar 3”, all 2025. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Júlia Standovár.

The suite of ascending scaled pictures, Unfolded Dollar 1–5, in styles from nostalgically cartoonesque to the Rococo flounces of François Boucher.

Jana Euler, “The fantasy of a highly potent creative act with little participation of human mankind, and the sheer multitude of packages that fly back in return”, 2025, oil on canvas, 82 1/2 x 79 inches. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Júlia Standovár.

Hand-rendered deep fake could be ascribed to The fantasy of a highly potent creative act with little participation of human mankind, and the sheer multitude of packages that fly back in return, one of Euler’s horse-themed works that descends into the realm of a My Little Pony mash-up.. The ineffable companion, More Morecoms, has Euler returning to the oft-repeated creature of legend with a pair of morphed renditions of the mythical beast, color coded gender-specific pink and blue, in the act of fornication in the middle of a desert highway whilst a roiling stormy sky threatens.

Euler’s work has been tagged as ‘demented painting’ by Rachel Wetzler, in a year end round-up.¶ This read, while topical, lacks the weight of Euler’s delving particularity. I would argue that with the centennial of Surrealism is currently being celebrated with two contrasting exhibitions–Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, at the Philadelphia Museum and the narrowly focused Sixties Surreal, at the Whitney–that Euler may be assigned as a practitioner of a continuum of the tenets of this movement, pulling from the age-old adage that in the continuum that art reflect it’s own time. Euler offers shadows of an earlier period of painting re-invigorated.

Moreover, Euler recalls the era that succeeded Modernism giving way to the European-centric Transavantgardia and the Zeitgeist International Art Exhibition (that brought ascendency to the work of A. R. Penck, Georg Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz, Rainer Fetting, K. H. Hodicke, Jorg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Helmut Middendorf, Sigmar Polke, Salome, Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Mimmo Paladino, Jonathan Borofsky, Malcolm Morley, Susan Rothenberg, David Salle, Julian Schnabel, et. al.) as well as the P.S. 1 exhibition New York/New Wave (featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and a wide range of the purveyors of the downtown NY spirit) that were collectively packaged under the banner of Neo-Expressionism. The spirit, flavor, and scope resides in Euler’s oeuvre–a one-person zeitgeist in her own right.

Continuing with the bestiary theme, Dog Walking, a distorted take on a chimera. A creature, built from an astounding array hounds, in a sort of modified riff on Surrealism’s exquisite corpse exercise-cum-parlour game. Strutting its stuff, with a certain attitude of smugness, across an avenue in what might be construed as an uptown Manhattan avenue (it could just as easily be Brooklyn, or Queens); talk about surreal!

The two adjoining rear galleries housed a pair of paintings each, containing seemingly disparate works that, in fact, are all about painting.

Jana Euler, “On the way to the studio”, 2025, oil on canvas, 110 1/2 x 81 inches. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Júlia Standovár.

On the way to the studio has a massive resplendent owl, with a fierce gaze common to the species, striding directly, and determinately, towards the viewer. Hedged in by encroaching modern hi-rise building of an urban business district. Whether this strigidae is headed to the studio, or the artist has come across this monstrosity while on a trek to the atelier, remains the central mystery. With the first choice delivering an opportunity for black humor, whilst the second option provides the shock of a natural, or man-induced, incident of horrific distress.

Jana Euler, “Creative Act (Spray can)”, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 118 1/4 x 59 1/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Júlia Standovár.

In stark contrast to the Audubon exactitude, Creative Act (Spray can) offers a pairing of elongated aerosol cans facing off,  á la Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots (even ascribing the signature blue and red from this toy), nozzles ablaze, in a battle royale showdown. The dual universes of comics and graffiti lend a sense of levity that leavens the affront.
 

Jana Euler, installation view, “The center does not fold”, Greene Naftali, New York, 2025. Left: “Centerfold”, 2025, oil on canvas, 114 1/4 x 80 3/4 inches; Right: “Creative Act (Paint tube)”, 2025, oil on canvas, 98 1/2 x 80 3/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Júlia Standovár.

The conjoining gallery is occupied by a pairing that materializes the inscrutable in full force. Centerfold, all deep wound (or womb) of rich crimsons, displays a flop-eared rabbit, exhibiting a mean disposition, at the top of a spindly Escheresque construction that descends, in cross-section, deep into the creature’s burrow. The very glow emitted here bathes the room in an alluring warmth.
 

Jana Euler, “Creative Act (Paint tube)”, 2025, oil on canvas, 98 1/2 x 80 3/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Júlia Standovár.

Creative Act (Paint tube) is all about the studio. Bereft of the painter tubes of pigment dance and cavort in a manner reminiscent of Disney’s Fantasia, emitting their gloppy substances in orgasmic climax. A cautionary tale that posits consideration as to whether this unfettered activity, upon discovery, will inspire rather than cause the inhabitant of the workplace to be aghast, given the mess left to deal with? Throughout, Euler prods the possibility of the canvases’ autonomy, inviting the notion that the inanimate has a life unto itself.

Euler’s practice, relying on classical medium, holds onto integrity given that the simulacrums reside in the realm of histrionics, therefore maintaining morality. (At least until the algorithms completely take over sentient space as we hurdle toward the threat of bridging man and machine by achieving AGI and fully autonomous robotics.)

What emerges from The center does not fold is work that is both analytic and ecstatic, rigorous yet wildly associative. Euler’s paintings are not didactic proclamations but provocations—dense living surfaces that demand not just contemplation but participation. The exhibition is less a center than a constellation: a set of gravitational yet discordant forces that resonate with the disjointed tempo of our own lived present.

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* Cabinet, London; dépendance, Brussels; Galerie Nue, Berlin; and Greene Naftali, NY. With UK & Ireland distribution handled through ART BATH and outside Europe covered by D.A.P.

† Quoted from the Press Release.

 ¶ Field Notes, The Year of Demented Painting: Surveying the final round of 2025 shows in New York by Rachel Wetzler, ARTFORUM, December  22, 2025.

Jana Euler: The center does not fold
Greene Naftali
508 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
November 14–January 10, 2026