Martha Jungwirth Solo exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai

The Long Museum is pleased to present Martha Jungwirth’s first museum exhibition in China to date. Born in 1940 in Vienna, the artist has garnered international acclaim for her singular approach to painting and critical role in Austria’s post-war art scene. Poised between abstraction and figuration, she draws upon a wide range of ‘pretexts’: from personal encounters, memories and travel to literature, current affairs, and art history. In her first exhibition of 2025, the Long Museum will show 21 recent oil paintings, bringing together multiple bodies of work that have been widely exhibited across major European institutions, including the artist’s acclaimed retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2024.

The works in the exhibition reflect the breadth of Jungwirth’s visual references. Scenes from ancient Greek mythology – the Trojan Horse emerges from gestural brushwork in one painting and the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes is reimagined across a series of three monumental works – form a dialogue with painted depictions of recent global events. In her series of paintings titled Rubymar, the artist’s subject is the ill-fated British cargo ship that sank in the Red Sea in 2024. Elsewhere, Jungwirth pays homage to art history and the Old Masters who have been influential to her own practice. Two groups of works on view in the exhibition are inspired by Francisco de Goya’s famous Still Life of a Lamb’s Head and Flanks (c. 1808–12) and The Dog (c. 1819–23). Jungwirth also references French Modernist painter Édouard Manet with two large works based on his iconic painting Asparagus (1880) held in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.