Martha Jungwirth Untitled (Maja III), 2022

This striking group of three large paintings by Martha Jungwirth pays homage to two famous portraits by Francisco de Goya, both in the collection of the Museo del Prado, Madrid. In Jungwirth’s Untitled (Maja I) (2021), the diaphanous silhouette with brown toes and a bright pink belt recalls the clothed version of Goya’s portrait, known as La Maja Vestida (The Clothed Maja, 1800– 1807). The fleshy palette of Jungwirth’s other two Maja paintings, in turn, evokes Goya’s more controversial nude version, La Maja Desnuda (The Naked Maja, 1795–1800). Like Goya, Jungwith highlights in Untitled (Maja II) and Untitled (Maja III) the female figure’s pubic hair, which caused a scandal when La Maja Desnuda was first publicly exhibited in the early nineteenth century. Goya’s painting is one of the earliest examples of female pilosity being depicted outside a mythological context or without any negative connotations. Jungwirth’s version, like Goya’s, is nearlifesize, recalling the Spanish master’s audacity in invoking the representational codes usually reserved for depictions of Venus to portray an ordinary woman, unabashedly gazing at the viewer. In Jungwirth’s rendition, the subject is abstracted, reduced to gestural strokes of colour, but retains the sensuous qualities of Goya’s originals, both in the gently curving lines and the artist’s signature carnal palette.