Martha Jungwirth valuation

Martha Jungwirth was born in Vienna in 1940 and studied at the Academy of Applied Arts there from 1956 to 1963, later teaching at the same school from 1967 to 1977. In 1968 she was the only woman among the founders of Wirklichkeiten, a group of Viennese painters introduced at the Secession that year, and in 1977 she showed at documenta 6 in Kassel. A stay in New York in 1974 and 1975 led to large drawings of household objects, but the work she is known for is gestural: patches, loops and smears of thinned oil, in pinks, reds, violets and greys, worked quickly on paper, with much of the sheet left bare. Each painting starts from something seen — a landscape, an animal, a body, a painting by Goya, a news photograph of fire — and keeps only a trace of it. For decades her reputation was largely Austrian; a retrospective at the Albertina in 2018, the year she received the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, and another at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2024 brought her to a much wider audience.

Most of her paintings are oil on paper, the larger ones mounted on canvas, and because the paper is left bare across much of the sheet, foxing, discolouration and handling marks show more than they would under a painted ground. Watercolours and smaller works on paper are common. Thaddaeus Ropac and Galerie Krinzinger are her galleries, and a provenance through either, with the date and support recorded, is what a buyer expects.