Martha Jungwirth Ohne Titel (aus der Serie "Circe"), 2021

In this work from Jungwirth’s Circe series, the silhouette of an animal is depicted on a white background in a reduced pictorial language that verges on abstraction. Jungwirth was inspired to paint these creatures by the Greek legend of the goddess Circe, who had the ability to transform humans into beasts. When visited by Odysseus and his men on their homeward journey after the Trojan war, she turned them into swines. Odysseus, protected by a herb gifted by Hermes, managed to persuade the sorceress to return his companions to human form, and they remain on her island of Aeaea for a year, feasting and drinking, before resuming their homeward journey.

Circe’s ability to transform humans into animals prompted philosophical questions about whether the existence as an unreasoning beast might be preferable to an existence as a human endowed with reason. To Jungwirth, ‘painting is always a sort of transformation, which can only be successful if freed from the artist’s own judgement. Even in simplicity, the integrity of a truthful and earnest approach is essential.’