Martha Jungwirth Australidelphia, 2020

Australidelphia (2020), a large-format composition on brown paper, demonstrates Martha Jungwirth’s eruptive style and her innovative visual language, marked by her exploration of colour and incisive lines. It also exemplifies her characteristic palette, composed of vermilion, pink and purple, with hues often inspired by flowers.

The title of the work, Australidelphia, is the name of a superorder of marsupials, encompassing wombats, koalas, possums, kangaroos and wallabies. The evocative title serves as a clue as to how to dissect the lines of paint and geometric fields of colour. Here, we perhaps distinguish crouching animals, surrounded by what could be darker shadows or foliage. Moved by ‘the animals that perished miserably in the bushfires of Australia’, the artist suggests both flesh and fire with this work’s intense colour palette of hot colours.

In autumn 2022, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is celebrating the artist with an extensive solo exhibition of her work spanning from the 1970s until today.