Martha Jungwirth’s Shattered World

Bilbao (Spain). In front of Martha Jungwirth’s painting, the eye is never at rest. Large-format, even very large-format canvases captivate the gaze. Totally unknown in France, the Austrian artist has been producing an unclassifiable body of work for over fifty years that stands out for its power. One would be tempted to speak of expressionism, if this stylistic category were not already well “occupied” by the history of art. So, figurative, abstract? It depends, because in each period and for each theme, Jungwirth puts to the test, in a different way, the powers of line and color.

Born in Vienna in 1940, she studied there at the University of Applied Arts, before forming the group Wirklichkeiten (Realities) in 1968. However, it was her stay in New York that left its mark on her pictorial production. The series of drawings entitled “Indesit” (named after a household appliance company) already shows the ambiguity of her way of representing objects. Translucent, as if seen through X-rays, these washing machines and dishwashers evoke ghostly visions of New York buildings. The fate of human beings is hardly better; incomplete bodies, deformed, hollowed-out faces, emptied of their features, transform people into disturbing apparitions (Portrait of Mrs. Wanke1986).

Then, there are “landscapes” where references to the visible world diminish and disappear. Each image is dictated not by observation on the motif but by the expression of a subjectivity. Masses of colors collide, discontinuous lines have no descriptive function, segments are interrupted for no apparent reason. Jungwirth does not seek stable and precisely delimited effects, but, on the contrary, the uncertainty that emanates from nature, the impossibility of fixing it. Can we speak of thwarted landscapes or of discordant painting?

In this universe, we see animals. We see them because the artist succeeds, with the help of a few sketched lines, in suggesting the anatomy of a horse – the splendid Bucephalus (2021) – or to capture the characteristic movement of a wriggling monkey (Monkey2021). When she features Australian marsupials, these “archaic” beasts sometimes referred to as “living fossils,” the result is reminiscent of prehistoric drawings on cave walls (“Australidelphiens” series, 2019-2020).

Survivors? One might think so, given a title like Apocalyptic animal (2018) or this ectoplasmic horse which wanders in a no man’s landalmost the only survivor of a battle (The Great Army2021). However, one might hope that there is one area spared from the ravages of time: art and its masterpieces. Wrongly so, because in the last room, more or less faithful variations on the famous The naked Maja by Goya. Lying down, the courtesan seems to gradually dissolve, as if her body had been sucked into the painting. Not far away, another similar horizontal form replaces the woman’s body. Intrigued, the viewer approaches and discovers a monumental version of theAsparagus by Manet, a magnificent and monstrous representative of this genre that we call still life.