A new series of oil paintings by award-winning Austrian artist Martha Jungwirth will be presented in a solo exhibition spanning both gallery floors.
Over the past six decades, Jungwirth has forged a singular approach to painting. An internationally acclaimed artist, her works are housed in many private and public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; European Parliament Art Collection, Brussels; and Rubell Museum, Miami.
Drawing upon what she terms conceptual ‘pretexts’ – impressions from her travels, Greek mythology, the appearances of friends and companions, as well as contemporary political events – her work captures fleeting, internal impulses that are recorded in paint. Mingling and merging with mythical or universal subject matter, her compositions hover between abstraction and figuration, the unconscious and the intentional, unbound and free, committed only to their own truth.
Touched by rich flashes of colour and form, Jungwirth’s palette is suffused with the evident tactility of her gestural movements. Filled with her vibrant brushstrokes, smudges, smears and lines, this body of work inhabits her ever-morphing zone of pure invention.
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 2021 she received the Grand Austrian State Prize, which is the Republic’s highest commendation for an outstanding life’s work in the field of art and is awarded on the proposal of the Austrian Art Senate. Jungwirth was admired by Robert Motherwell in the 1970s and in 2010 Albert Oehlen dedicated an entire room to her in the exhibition he curated for the Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg.
Martha Jungwirth’s works have been exhibited internationally in numerous institutions, including solo exhibitions at the Albertina in Vienna and the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg, both in 2018. In September this year, an extensive solo exhibition of her work will open at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.
Martha Jungwirth: All Will Fall | Press Release
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