JANA EULER
Schultze Projects #5: Triptych – Image Viewer Connections

Museum Ludwig
Heinrich-Böll-Platz, 50667 Köln

On view through July 2028

The Museum Ludwig, Cologne, has unveiled a new work by Jana Euler for its fifth iteration of Schultze Projects, a series of multi-year commissions for the museum’s central stairwell. Euler’s Triptych – Image Viewer Connections responds to the museum’s foyer as a central artery of movement, and deals with the specifics of perceiving art that define the museum experience.

Euler’s three-panel painting addresses the process of finding a viewpoint that a stairwell would seem to destabilize. The leftmost picture depicts a long-haired collie, which races towards visitors as they ascend the staircase. Her other two compositions directly quote elements of the museum’s wood or tile floors, morphed with human features that emerge on closer inspection. The outer panels force viewers’ perspectives as they lean off the wall, while the multiple eyes of the central panel, titled Nude Stairs Staring Back, address viewers from all three levels of the stairwell. For Euler, those anthropomorphized stairs “make eye contact with every position from which the wall and the picture can be seen.”

This triptych is surrounded by a mural replicating the foyer’s curved ceiling, painted directly on the surrounding walls; its trompe-l’oeil effects make the artist’s already large-scale canvases appear monumental. Taken together, the works reward concentrated forms of looking, and underscore the shifts in meaning wrought by the perspective from which something is seen.

Curated by Yilmaz Dziewior, Jana Euler’s Schultze Projects #5 is on view at Museum Ludwig, Cologne, through July 2028.

For more information, visit the Museum’s website.