Martha Jungwirth Joins the Gallery
Thaddaeus Ropac is delighted to welcome Martha Jungwirth to the gallery for worldwide representation and will show her first solo exhibition in the Paris Marais space in Autumn 2021. To mark the occasion of her representation, we invite you to view an online presentation of new and historic works by the artist alongside a video filmed at her studio speaking about her practice.
Martha Jungwirth is a fascinating artist who has remained true to her unique painterly language for decades. She consistently achieves a great sense of intimacy through abstraction, at times in surprising ways, and her precise mark making is bestowed with a poetic attentiveness. We are delighted to be working with her and we look forward to bringing her work to international audiences.
— Thaddaeus Ropac
Jungwirth creates intimate, abstract paintings that are at once highly subjective and personal, fluid and calculated, while retaining a plethora of references to Greek mythology, history and the present-day environments of their production. Her brushstrokes, splatters, stains and 'constellations of blotches' never overwhelm her chosen surfaces, which carry their own material traces and histories. Areas of untouched cardboard or collaged paper play a crucial role in the composition and become arenas for gestural actions. With a career spanning more than fifty years, Jungwirth's idiosyncratic, non-conformist approach to painting has been revered by her contemporaries and the next generation of artists alike, and her works exhibited and housed in the collections of significant institutions.
It is no surprise that such an explorer is first and foremost an artist for artists. Admired by Robert Motherwell in the 1970s. Admired by Albert Oehlen in 2010, who delved into the Essl collection and dedicated an entire room to Martha Jungwirth (the only artist he devoted an entire room to) in the exhibition he curated. Half a year ago in Upper New York, Sean Scully only wanted to talk to me about Martha Jungwirth and the wild taste of her luscious magenta, that colour named in 1858 after the bloodiest battle to date, which had just been produced synthetically for the first time. Martha Jungwirth: an artist for artists.
— Klaus Albrecht Schröder, Director, The Albertina Museum, Vienna, on the occasion of awarding the Oskar Kokoschka Prize to Martha Jungwirth in 2018
Only rarely does painting balance so elegantly and authentically on the line between realism and abstraction as Martha Jungwirth's does, revealing prefigurations in the pictorial organism that do not ultimately materialise. This is due to the artist's acute feeling for intentional composition and the play with chance, for automatism and association, as well as her tendency to permeate actual, motivic elements with vague, undefined ones.
— Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum, on the occasion of the retrospective at Kunsthalle Krems, 2014
She caught my eye in a group of male artists from which she clearly stands out in terms of quality. And yet, she is the least known of them. This leads me to suspect that in this one particular case, gender may have played a role. This kind of painting is considered particularly masculine and Joan Mitchell has only been getting the recognition she deserves for the last five years or so.
— Albert Oehlen, artist, 2010
