Martha Jungwirth Der letzte Tag ist der schlimmste

The exhibition Der letzte Tag ist der schlimmste (The Last Day is the Worst) presents works by Austrian artist Martha Jungwirth, created over the last five years. The paintings on view reflect her distinctive visual language while highlighting subtle variations within her practice. Discernible figural elements emerge in some works, while others remain more resolutely rooted in abstraction. This periodic engagement with figuration highlights the fluidity of Jungwirth’s approach, wherein structure and intuition are held in delicate balance. For the artist, impressions of the world around her trigger the fleeting inner impulses that guide her practice. This most recent series of works relates to the turbulent developments in current world affairs, and the exhibition’s title references an article recently published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which reported on the dire conditions of a Ukrainian mortar unit. ‘My works are recordings of my emotions,’ says Jungwirth.

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Fascinated by the way images convey cultural meaning across time, Jungwirth looks to current photographs collected from newspaper clippings, as well as reproductions of varying artworks or architectural elements and affixes them to her studio walls for visual reference. Known for a colour palette that dwells in a corporeal and sensuous register of pinks and reds, some of these latest works feature bold, bright yellows and turquoise hues. ‘My main focus lies on red tones in all the variations that are available. Sometimes, however, I have to expand this colour palette. This yellow colour, for instance, suggests something aggressive, almost vicious,’ explains Jungwirth.

Martha Jungwirth

Untitled, 2024
Oil on paper on canvas
241 × 187.3 cm (94.88 × 73.74 in)

 

Guido Reni

Atalanta and Hippomenes, 1620/25
Oil on canvas
206 × 279 cm (81.10 × 109.84 in)
Museo del Prado, Madrid

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Jungwirth’s portraits and series on works from art history are journeys to other worlds of personality; for example, those portrayed become a purely real, peripheral point of departure that is to be artistically transformed. Like the landscapes and the cities, they will also become the catalyst for an engagement with the inner sound, with the atmosphere of a reality perceived by the artist that is to be transposed to visibility.

— Antonia Hoerschelmann, Albertina Museum, Vienna

Although firmly grounded in abstraction, her compositions sometimes hint at motifs, such as elements of the Old Master paintings that have been influential to her practice. Body-like forms appear to materialise from a cascade of passionate streaks, smears and splatters. The composition of this untitled work, stretching over two metres in height, is reminiscent of a marquee – or the hoop skirts in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). However, as is characteristic of her work, Jungwirth only distantly references the historical motifs, detaching them from any imminent symbolism or meaning. As with all her subjects, the forms remain beyond the easily identifiable, shifting between the realms of the real and imagined, the embodied and transcendent.

Martha Jungwirth

Untitled, 2024
Oil on paper on canvas
242.3 × 168.4 cm (95.39 × 66.3 in)

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For her compositions that oscillate between abstraction and figuration, the untouched surface of the painting ground is of great importance, as is the balance between the ‘controlled and the uncontrolled,’ as the artist describes it. Areas of ground are left bare, allowing the texture of her cardboard supports to appear. ‘Jungwirth has consistently sought liberation in her engagement with unconventional materials that defy the conventions of traditional artistic repertoires,’ writes Lekha Hileman Waitoller, curator of the retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The rough, absorbent surface creates a specific effect, emphasising the openness and materiality of Jungwirth’s painterly gestures. Her paintings bear traces of her movement: finger marks, scratches and even shoeprints are an intimate index of the artist’s presence. She describes her painting process as an ‘adventure’ driven by a direct rhythm involving the body, during which images unfurl, grow and reveal themselves. ‘My painting is action and passion: a dynamic space.’

Martha Jungwirth

Der Wal, 2024

Oil on paper on canvas
242.3 × 320.8 cm (95.39 × 126.3 in)

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My pictorial reality is charged with passion, a language tied to the body, to dynamic movement. Painting is a matter of form, and then it receives a soul – through me.

— Martha Jungwirth

In contrast to the rational principles of Minimalism and Conceptualism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, Jungwirth’s paintings convey a palpable sense of self. ‘My art is like a diary, seismographic,’ Jungwirth says. ‘That is the method of my work. I am completely related to myself. Drawing and painting are a movement that runs through me.’ The exhibition shows expansive, large-format works that are characterised by a ‘flowing painting process.’ As the artist states: ‘When you work on a large format, there is less density, you have the feeling that all the possibilities remain open to you.’

Martha Jungwirth

Untitled, 2025
Oil on paper on canvas
137.8 × 166.7 cm (54.25 × 65.63 in)

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This untitled work from 2025 shows a reclining human figure reduced to a few sparse lines. The exaggerated pose and protruding limbs recall the sprawled female nudes of Henri Matisse or Henry Moore. Jungwirth depicts the physicality of the human body in a way that does not establish whether the figure is lying in a state of relaxation or whether it is an injured body or even a skeletal form – an impression further heightened by the corporeal register of fleshy pink and violet. The figure calls to mind the archaic preverbal world of the first lines drawn in cave paintings, acknowledging ties with the origins of art.

Martha Jungwirth

Untitled, 2025
Oil on paper on canvas
91.5 × 222.6 cm (36.02 × 87.64 in)

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Martha Jungwirth’s paintings […] always seem to grant us just a glimmering hint of what lies behind them, something hidden that will never be fully visible. Just like shifting reflections on water’s surface that still allow us to partially make out what is beneath, Jungwirth’s use of colour offers a continuous invitation to look without ever truly offering any kind of ultimate clarity.

— Alice Oswald, quoted from the exhibition catalogue Long Museum, Shanghai

Change emerges as a crucial player in Jungwirth's work, intricately woven into her artistic formula. Despite her aesthetic concept and painterly language, where considerations such as splotches and gestural movements are carefully crafted, Jungwirth purposefully leaves room for the unexpected. […] By not adhering to a predefined goal, the paintings evolve naturally. When unforeseen elements occur during the act of painting, they propel Jungwith to venture further into the creative unknown. This embrace of risk, this intentional allowance for chance, forms an integral part of Jungwirth's artistic ethos.

— Lekha Hileman Waitoller, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Martha Jungwirth

Untitled, 2020
Oil on paper on canvas
157 × 241.2 cm (61.81 × 94.96 in)

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What is, in any event, predictable about Jungwirth’s pictures is their unpredictability. Their freedom is manifest. ‘Freedom’ not because they are ‘wild,’ gesturally rendered, amorphous forms, but because they are always articulated in a different way, and leave a different mark, testifying to the idiosyncrasy of physical movement, which, in turn, interacts with the idiosyncratic movement of thought.

 

— Jörg Heiser, Universität der Künste Berlin

Learn more about the artist  

 

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