ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ

The exhibition Der letzte Tag ist der schlimmste (The Last Day is the Worst) presents new works by Austrian artist Martha Jungwirth. Created following her celebrated career retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2024, the paintings on view reflect her distinctive visual language, which is defined by sparing but expressive dabs of colour and brushstrokes. For Jungwirth, impressions of the world around her trigger the fleeting inner impulses that determine her practice. ‘My works are recordings of my emotions,’ says the artist. The exhibition’s title references an article recently published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which reported on the dire conditions of a Ukrainian mortar unit.

Over the course of her career, Martha Jungwirth has forged a singular approach to abstraction that is grounded in the body and closely observed perceptions of the world around her: from personal encounters, memories and travel to literature, current affairs and art history. Fascinated by how images convey cultural meaning across time, Jungwirth looks to current photographs collected from newspaper clippings, as well as reproductions of varying artworks or architectural elements and affixes them to her studio walls for visual reference. Known for a colour palette that dwells in a corporeal and sensuous register of pinks and reds, some of these latest works feature bold, bright yellows and turquoise hues. ‘The main focus lies on red tones in all the variations that are available. Sometimes, however, I have to expand this colour palette. This yellow colour, for instance, suggests something aggressive, almost vicious,’ explains Jungwirth.

Although firmly grounded in abstraction, her compositions sometimes hint at motifs, such as elements of the Old Master paintings that have been influential to her practice. Body-like forms appear to materialise from a cascade of passionate streaks, smears and splatters. The composition of one of her untitled works (2024, pictured), for example, stretching over two metres, is reminiscent of a marquee – or the hoop skirts in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). However, as is characteristic of her work, Jungwirth only distantly references the historical motifs, detaching them from any imminent symbolism or meaning. As with all her subjects, the forms remain beyond the easily identifiable, shifting between the realms of the real and imagined, the embodied and transcendent.

For her compositions that oscillate between abstraction and figuration, the untouched surface of the painting ground is of great importance, as is the balance between the ‘controlled and the uncontrolled,’ as the artist describes it. Areas of ground are left bare, allowing the texture of her cardboard supports to appear. ‘Jungwirth has consistently sought liberation in her engagement with unconventional materials that defy the conventions of traditional artistic repertoires,’ writes Lekha Hileman Waitoller, curator of the retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The rough, absorbent surface creates a specific effect, which emphasises the openness and materiality of Jungwirth’s painterly gestures. Her paintings bear traces of her movement: finger marks, scratches and even shoeprints are an intimate index of the artist’s presence. She describes her painting process as an ‘adventure’ driven by a direct rhythm involving the body, during which images unfurl, grow and reveal themselves. ‘My painting is action and passion: a dynamic space.’