Jana Euler’s Paintings Are Ugly, But Not Bad

Jana Euler does not make bad paintings, but she does, more often than not, make ugly ones. Though her work ricochets between diverse stylistic registers, it tends toward the viscerally off-putting, grating, or garish, qualities that are curiously amplified by her display of sheer painterly competence. Bad painting and ugly painting are often conflated—there is even some categorical slippage in Marcia Tucker’s catalogue essay for her 1978 New Museum exhibition “Bad Painting&rdqu