Martha Jungwirth Antiphon, 2020

Martha Jungwirth wrote about painting during the pandemic that ‘when you are isolated you make a jigsaw puzzle out of your memories, some things are more animated and lively, they hang together like a mycelium. This context in which I had to live has had an effect on my life. My work was reduced to the gesture, the skeletal. Condensation.’ Antiphon (2020) connects the self to the external world, with expressive, poetic brushstrokes bringing together intimate memories and sensations with the grandiosity of ancient myths and the limits of civilisations. The reduced pictorial language of the animal brings to mind the preverbal world and the first lines drawn in cave paintings, acknowledging ties with the origins of art. Its title refers to verses taken from a religious text sung as part of the liturgy: traditional texts that remain unchanged through generations. In this sense, we can imagine this lone horse as, like the subjects of many of Jungwirth’s other recent works, a silent witness to unfolding history. Marta Jungwirth’s first exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac, entitled Recent Paintings, is on show at the Paris Marais gallery from 4 September until 16 October 2021.