Martha Jungwirth valuation
Viennese painter of fast, translucent gestures in oil on paper, starting from something seen and leaving very little of it.
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.
What a work by Martha Jungwirth is worth
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Bio
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.
Wirklichkeiten, documenta 6 and Bilbao
The other members of Wirklichkeiten were Wolfgang Herzig, Kurt Kocherscheidt, Peter Pongratz, Franz Ringel and Robert Zeppel-Sperl, and the group exhibited together from 1968 to 1972.
The Kunsthalle Krems gave her a retrospective in 2014 and Museum Liaunig another for her eightieth birthday in 2020, and she received the Grand Austrian State Prize in 2021.
Alfred Schmeller, the Miró Prize and the Opera curtain
Wirklichkeiten argued for a realist painting with more to say about society than the Informel that dominated at the time, although Jungwirth herself always worked on the line between abstraction and figuration. She won the Joan Miró Prize in Barcelona in 1966 and a prize at the Florence graphics biennale in 1974, and in 1980 a DAAD fellowship took her to Berlin. In 1969 she married the art historian and museum director Alfred Schmeller.
For the 2019 to 2020 season at the Vienna State Opera she painted The Trojan Horse, a picture of 176 square metres for the safety curtain, in the series of curtain commissions organised by museum in progress. She received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 2012. Watercolour is at the centre of her work, and she lives and works in Vienna and at Neumarkt an der Raab in Burgenland.
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