During her 60-year artistic career, the painter Martha Jungwirth (Austrian, born in 1940) has explored the rich and multifaceted tradition of gestural abstraction, using the body as an instrument to address the production of images. Jungwirth has aimed at investigating the possibility of creating primordial images that pop up before language or rationality come into play.

Using her body as a vehicle through which she can combine her great painterly skills, Jungwirth has aspired to imbue her paintings with her subjectivity and intuition – as opposed to different artistic movements of the 20th century that have attempted to remove the hand of the artist from the work and question the idea of the self. Jungwirth works with impulses coming from the outside world, such as political events, art history or her daily life, which she then digests and transfers into her paintings and watercolors. The artist works mostly on large brown sheets of paper, which she then fixes into canvasses, as she likes the smooth texture of the paper instead of the already structured canvas. For smaller paintings, she uses cardboard. The paper offers no resistance to the brush so that it can act fast, while the paper’s or cardboard’s own physical appearance can enrich the work.

Jungwirth allows all kind of elements to enter her works; she sometimes uses her finger to apply the paint, or leaves shoe prints, stains or other traces of her daily life on the paper. What is interesting about painting on paper is that the corrections are not easy to make, so all the artist’s movements, even those unintended, remain visible on the surface as if to stress human fallibility. Untitled (2020), which just returned from Jungwirth’s retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, is an emotional painting in which her strong gestural marks, in the artist’s favorite violet color that she combines with pink and brown, strongly suggest her physical presence.