Impeccably painted and engulfing in scale, Jana Euler’s Beer without Glass from 2014 exemplifies the artist’s technical mastery and humorous ethos. The painting was first shown in her solo exhibition In at dépendance, Brussels. In Euler’s own words, the works in the exhibition were “trying to treat both the structure and the filling separately,” and in the present work, “the beer is painted without a glass and with no lines, just the inner material. But the shape of it is one of beer in a glass.” (Jana Euler quoted in: Press release, Brussels, dépendance, In, February – March 2014, online) Taking the most fundamental painterly exercise of expressing volume and form, Euler’s beer glass not only reflects her indisputable painterly command, but her openness to explore a diverse array of conceptual and stylistic avenues. At the same t.mes , Euler joyously delves into the stereotypical Belgian cliché of beer, enlarging it to fill a canvas which span floor-to-ceiling on the wall that faced the main window of the gallery. Reminiscent of extreme close-up paintings of food such as Domenico Gnoli's Apple, the absurd scale and mundane subject matter of the present work invites close looking and new perspectives on our everyday objects. Looking into the golden liquid, grooves of the beer glass and its distortion prompt a new unfamiliarity.

Euler was born in Friedberg, Germany and studied at Frankfurt’s Städelschule under Michael Krebber, whose lineage begins with Albert Oehlen in the 1980s, then into Martin Kippenberger in the 1990s. And it is within this lineage of post-war German painters, their jokey attitude and scepticism towards the field of painting, that we can understand the particular self-consciousness and tongue-in-cheek humour present in Euler’s work. Tapping into her German identity and locality of the space, Euler doesn’t provide pictorial context for the beer – no hands holding the glass, reflections of a drunken party, or even slivers of background behind the superimposed glass. Instead, the glass simply stands immaculately painted, two-meter tall, in a Belgian gallery facing the streets of Brussels. Subtle and deadpan, Beer without Glass exemplifies Euler’s characteristic brand of humour. Astutely aware of the nature of images, their distribution, and how it relates to the dynamics of social life, Euler’s paintings represent some of the most unique contemporary painterly visions.