Untitled

Created in 2017, Martha Jungwirth’s Untitled harnesses a kaleidoscopic force. Waves of opulent colour emerge from the centre of the painting, a vortex of vibrant jewel tones that wrap upon themselves forming their own furious ball of energy. Paint drips, flickers, rushes, and ripples in all directions. Bold pink, deep mauve, and crimson—the artist’s preferred pigments—coalesce with flashes of golden yellow, cobalt, and green. Painting, for Jungwirth, is a wholly physical act that ‘starts from a concurrence of outward movement, bodily movement, and inward movement’ (quoted in K. Nedo, ‘Martha Jungwirth talks about her painting process’, Artforum, vol. 62, no. 10, Summer 2024). At once atomic and celestial, the present work is a chromatic forcefield too powerful to be contained. Despite its cosmic associations, the colours are fleshy and visceral, and the intensity of the brushwork captures Jungwirth’s decidedly corporeal movements.

Born in Vienna in 1940, Jungwirth studied at the city’s Academy of Applied Arts, coming of age in an art world where Minimalism and Conceptual Art were all the rage. Jungwirth, however, was more interested in developing an idiom that was distinctly biographical. She looks to her own encounters, Greek mythology and art history—the present work echoes the chromatic and poetic force of works by Cy Twombly—among other private touchstones. ‘My art is like a diary, seismographic,’ she has written. ‘My state of mind plays a big role’ (quoted in ibid.). Jungwirth has only ever painted on paper, which is her preferred support, though the type varies, and she has experimented with all sorts including packing paper, handmade paper from India, and the pages of old books, each affecting the ways in which her pigments pool and lay. Jungwirth, more than anything, is a colourist par excellence, and works such as the present offer a pictorial universe composed of the most exuberant tones.