Martha Jungwirth Inside the studios of seven in-demand artists in their eighties and nineties

Though crafts that rely on the dexterity of your hands become more difficult as you age, your decades of learning and life experience can imbue what you create with depth and unique perspectives. Here, we visit the studios of seven artists who continue to paint in their eighties or nineties, still staging big exhibitions, selling work and finding inspiration.

By Alexei Korolyov

At 85, Martha Jungwirth remains as industrious as she was when she first appeared on the art scene in the early 1960s. Her belated recognition (she only began attracting serious attention and staging large solo exhibitions in the 2010s) and the attendant title of grande dame of Austrian art have not made her aloof. Instead, she is kind and inquisitive, asking as many questions as she answers. Jungwirth works in watercolour or oil on paper rather than canvas and her style is marked by colourful abstraction, with pinks and reds at the fore.

Jungwirth’s wanderlust has taken her across the world, though in recent years she has favoured Greece, which she first visited with her late husband, art historian Alfred Schmeller. “When you travel, you meet people, you eat differently and you feel that you don’t understand anything,” she says as she shows Monocle a series of watercolours from Bali, comprising her impressions of the custom of placing small, stylised houses outside homes. “That activates you again.”

In Jungwirth’s large, light-filled studio, pride of place is shared equally between her current works and her sources of inspiration: reproductions of baroque paintings (classical art has always moved her), alongside newspaper clippings and photographs scattered among countless paint tubes. “I don’t even know what colours are in them,” she says. It is this disorder that drives her to keep working and exploring.

“I always try to surprise myself. Otherwise, you stiffen up and get stuck.”