Martha Jungwirth Geh nicht aus dem Zimmer
Overview
Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais presents an exhibition of works by Austrian artist Martha Jungwirth. The exhibition centres around a remarkable large-scale 131-part installation of drawings and paintings on paper interspersed with texts cut from newspapers – described by Bernard Blistène as a ‘great frieze of unruly images’ – created over the course of three years. This monumental work will be accompanied by a selection of the artist’s recent paintings, as well as a group of watercolours, the earliest of which date from the 1980s.
Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais presents an exhibition of works by Austrian artist Martha Jungwirth. The exhibition centres around a remarkable large-scale 131-part installation of drawings and paintings on paper interspersed with pages cut from newspapers – described by Bernard Blistène as a ‘great frieze of unruly images’ – created over the course of five years between 1987 and 1992. This monumental work will be accompanied by a group of the artist’s recent paintings, as well as a selection of watercolours, the earliest of which date from the 1980s.
As Jungwirth has described, ‘My art is like a diary, seismographic. That is the method of my work. Drawing and painting are a movement that runs through me.’ The monumental work at the heart of the exhibition exemplifies the artist’s diaristic approach to abstraction. She made its component drawings half-looking at the paper in an instinctive process resembling automatic writing, and they are hung on the wall page-by-page like an unbound, unravelling journal, stacked four high. In some, thoughts seethe across the page in the form of furtive notes and annotations in the artist’s hand. There is a striking sense of confidentiality in Jungwirth’s work; a sense that we are privy to a secret.
The title of the exhibition, Geh nicht aus dem Zimmer (Don’t leave your room), manifests this diaristic introspection. It refers to a poem by Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky that bears no title but is known by these opening words. Impassioned yet obstinate, it implores the reader: ‘Don’t leave your room. Pretend a cold in the head. / What could be more exciting than wallpaper, chair and bed?’ It relates directly to the private and deeply personal painting process behind the 131 intimate works on paper, many of which Jungwirth made at twilight in front of the television. More than 30 years after their creation, Jungwirth has assembled them into a single composite artwork in order to confront herself once again with the transient impulses that generated them.
Jungwirth works intuitively, making works that convey a palpable sense of self, yet are far from absolute introspection. Though created in a context of sublime solitude, the narrative that unfolds on the wall is grounded in the real world, as testified to by the pages Jungwirth has cut out from the culture sections of newspapers to intersperse with her own drawings and paintings. They start art-historical conversations within the frieze itself – with the sewn-up scars of a fabric Louise Bourgeois head, or Rogier van der Weyden’s sorrowful The Descent from the Cross – but also invite the viewer to imagine Jungwirth flicking through the newspaper as she works. Current affairs are among her key inspirations.
In this multipart work, across a variety of media – ink, charcoal, watercolour, oil paint – figuration appears from amidst abstraction, before being concealed again. Faces, torsos, limbs and the digits of hands and feet surface from within flurries of lines: ‘insistent lines – a combination of erasures and crossings-out [...] which scar the surface of the paper as figures emerge’, as curator Blistène describes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition. Among the proliferation of drawings we find small paintings in which pools of colour are ‘magmas, impastos that muddy the surface, interrupt the narrative and come to obliterate it.’
Jungwirth’s watercolours are just as elusive. Watercolour, the medium with which the artist commenced her painting career, is represented in the exhibition with a small group of works from the 1980s and 1990s. It is possible to understand Jungwirth’s watercolours from this period, as curator and critic Thomas Mießgang has written, ‘as a phenomenological approximation of those things which remain fleeting and evasive in their time-bound lack of contour.’ Shapes and lines cluster together at the centre of the paper as if constructing something that never quite solidifies. They are both evasive and evasions: as Blistène writes, ‘Jungwirth says that her paintings invite an escape: ‘Malfluchten’. Listen to the sound of the word, don’t look for a literal meaning. ‘Flüchten’ means ‘to flee’ in English.’
‘There are frugal artists who make do with five cans of paint’, Jungwirth says. ‘That’s not my way. I’m all about the nuance of color.’ Her most recent paintings in oil testify to this, diving ever deeper into the subtleties of her signature palette of vivid pinks and bruised magentas while also investigating other tonal registers: cooler lilacs and blues; earthy greens, browns and oranges. ‘I want to create out of abundance’, Jungwirth explains, a position that aligns her approach to colour with her distinctive markmaking, where accumulating gestures remain like an index of her process. That same impulse finds its fullest expression in the central frieze, whose richness arises from acts of gathering, amassing and assembling.
A catalogue illustrating the installation and featuring an essay by Bernard Blistène will accompany the exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Marais.
