What passes through her hands is transformed

Martha Jungwirth's career got off to a late start. Today she is recognized as a grande dame of painting. Thaddaeus Ropac, dedicating an exhibition to her, has played a decisive role in this.

Martha Jungwirth celebrated a memorable success when she was invited to take part in Documenta6 in Kassel. At that time, in 1977, she was 37 years old, had studied painting in her hometown of Vienna, but had also already taught and developed an extremely independent mode of expression with her paintings, which oscillate between abstraction and figuration. In the following years, however, things became quieter around her. In any case, female artists were still rarely the focus of the art world, and perhaps the time was not yet ripe for the immediacy of vehement outbursts alongside sensitive subtlety with which Martha Jungwirth's watercolors and oil paintings surprise us.

“My painting is action and passion: a dynamic space,” says the artist. It would be easy to assume young wildness behind the courage to tackle large-format, unprimed papers or canvases with verve and spontaneity and to leave large areas of these “naked” surfaces untouched. In fact, however, this is the culmination of a profound exploration of the medium of painting, which leads to the translation of sensations and states of excitement into color as a reaction to what has been experienced, seen, read and remembered, and explains the fusion of purely gestural and figurative elements. Unsurprisingly, this happens in particular with energetic red in all its shades.