Jana Euler, Form Follows Information Exchange 1, 2, and 3 (left to right), 2010, wood, clay, varnish, electronics. Installation view, Dépendance, Brussels. Photo: Sven Laurent.

Moreover, from the early twentieth century through the 1980s (the heyday of Virginia Slims’ well-known slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby”), cigarettes also signified women’s emancipation, which may also help account for their appearance in Euler’s works. Certainly with the series of women’s portraits Euler showed at Real Fine Arts this past spring, she had visibly broken free of the male-dominated universe depicted in her earlier portraits. The friends portrayed here likewise catered to their own desires—the painter captured one of them taking a drag on a cigarette, another slurping an oyster. She had not, however, abandoned the affiliation with Neue Sachlichkeit. The thin layers of oil she used to create these pictures once again allude to that movement and the way in which its own facture recalled Northern Renaissance panel painting.

One self-portrait from this series, in particular—Identity Forming Processes Overpainted, 2012—highlights the particularly strong connection in these works between the artist’s person and her artistic product. The three brushes painted into the picture invoke three myths of painting: the myth that the absent artist is somehow present in the picture; the myth that it is possible for the beholder to gain an understanding of this absent painter, thanks to the seeming immediacy and indexicality of the work’s gestures; and, conversely, the myth of agency, that is, the myth that the painting has painted itself. (Proliferating eyes, one of Euler’s favorite motifs, feed the myth of the picture as a self-active quasi subject.) Painters have obviously been dealing with their medium’s myths for centuries. But by piling up such venerable painterly tropes, exposing and even mocking their metaphysics, Euler accesses the legacy of numerous more recent painterly practices, specifically those that, beginning in the early ’90s, reconciled painting with the insights of postwar institutional critique. It was a historic accomplishment of sorts when artists like Martin Kippenberger highlighted the importance of personal relationships and pointed to the symbolic value of one’s social scenes. Moreover, these artists insisted that their practices encompassed an entire range of activities and outputs, from paintings to publicity materials to self-presentation. Transposing characteristics of institutional critique to painting—which, of course, had long been regarded as institutional critique’s most determined antagonist—was provocative in itself. But Kippenberger, Merlin Carpenter, R. H. Quaytman, et al., actually extended institutional critique’s central insight—that the particular institutional conditions in which an artistic practice operates shape that practice to its core—by acknowledging that relationships have no less institutional relevance. Yet as so often happens with progressive innovations, in the early years of the new millennium this mode underwent a radical shift and morphed into its opposite. It became an aesthetic convention that corresponded to the increased value of social contacts in the new economy. Today, painting exhibitions reflecting on their institutional conditions or taking site-sensitive measures have become the standard.

Euler’s practice doesn’t depart from this standard—quite the opposite. In addition to their critical reflection of the imperative to network, her exhibitions always include site-specific gestures. On the occasion of her show at Real Fine Arts, for example, she set up two partitions made of cloudy translucent plastic sheeting stretched over wooden frames. These not only paid tribute to the particular architectural situation at the gallery but also stood, semitransparent and framed, as pictures of sorts. It was as though painting had triumphed once again over the reflex to engage in institutional critique, which has itself often turned into a routine gesture anyway. The Body of the Exhibition 2 similarly refers to the gallery’s floor plan, squeezing the bizarrely contorted, many-eyed body into a configuration determined by the space’s layout. Like this body, Euler’s work fits itself to the frame. She doesn’t break convention—she makes the sometimes-excruciating restraints it imposes visible and explicit, performing a black comedy of accommodation.

UNLIKE IN THE 1970S AND ’80S, when painterly practices still faced considerable pressure to justify themselves, painting has now become contemporary art’s given, its granted premise. For evidence, one might note that artists such as Jenny Holzer and Mathias Poledna, whom one would not ordinarily associate with painting, have recently taken up the format of the picture on canvas. To a significant degree, painting owes its growing appeal to a push by theorists to buttress its legitimacy, with David Joselit’s brilliant 2009 essay “Painting Beside Itself” being especially noteworthy in this regard. In this oft-cited text, Joselit proclaims the visualization of social networks as a worthwhile painterly strategy and uses the term “transitive painting” to describe practices that “actualiz[e] the behavior of objects within networks”—i.e., perpetual circulation and retranslation—by staging the “passage” from “painting-as-cultural artifact to the social networks surrounding it.” (He aptly cites Jutta Koether’s picture-performances as an example of this staging.) Joselit’s essay contributed decisively to the establishment of a new paradigm—the paradigm of network painting. Artists of Euler’s generation have been dealing with this paradigm—and, more broadly, with the institutionalization of the positions staked out by Kippenberger and his cohort—in a variety of ways, ranging from naive illustrations of the network-painting model to more complex and nuanced responses. Euler occupies the latter end of the spectrum. At first glance, it might seem that her pictures do exactly what Joselit suggests: They visualize networks, whether those of art-world authorities, literal constellations, or the artist’s circle of friends. Yet whereas Joselit’s essay takes an oddly positive view of the network concept—or, at least, has little to say about the hierarchies, exclusions, and social violence that may intrude into the smooth concatenation of relationships implied by this technical metaphor for the social—Euler’s work foregrounds the vexations of the networked life in her exaggerated figurative deformations and repulsive flesh tones.