“Through the gaze, we can transform everything”
About Martha Jungwirth honored by two major exhibitions, at the Palazzo Cini in Venice until September 29 and at the Guggenheim in Bilbao until September 22.
To be honest, the reproductions of Martha Jungwirth's paintings leave me completely cold. Perhaps I would have to find myself without a filter in front of her abstract works of art to be able to appreciate them, to be able to possibly feel something at the sight of these spots of bright colors that do not reach my sensitivity by transmission on glossy paper in the contemporary art magazine Artpress of this month of September. I have no doubt that they can release a force, a kind of power when one is in front of the canvas that is stained with them. It is surely not for nothing that one of her works of art recently sold for almost 26,000 euros... But hey, rating or not on the contemporary art market, me, nada, I do not vibrate. And imagine that now, it bothers me. Yes: I just read the interview of Martha Jungwirth by Laure Adler in Artpress precisely… and I love it!
I find it magical to not be sensitive to works of art for sale, then to meet the artist… and to suddenly fall in love with this great lady to the point of passionately wanting to love her work too. To love especially this little girl born in 1940 in Vienna, who grew up in the suburbs of Kaisermühlen, raised only by her mother and grandmother, who stopped her from hanging out in the street with the “rascals” by providing her with books and colored pencils, worrying about her passion for red beetroot, whose color fascinated her so much that she put it everywhere, to the point of considering taking her to a psychiatrist. “At the time, I colored my lips with beetroot juice. I didn’t know the word psychiatry but it didn’t ring a bell,” Martha Jungwirth explains to her interlocutor. This woman is hilarious. And discovering a little further on that, until the death of her husband, an art critic, museum curator and photographer, her work was completely despised on the sole pretext that she was supposed to be there only because she was “the wife of”… it makes me want to defend her work even more! What do you mean, that’s not a very artistic argument?
“I was exhibiting before I met him, but how can I put it? At the time, you had no chance as a woman and my husband couldn’t do anything for me. Everyone would have disqualified me in advance by reducing me to my status as a girlfriend. On the other hand, this situation was very positive because I was never subjected to anything, nor forced to adapt,” Martha kindly notes. A little sad in truth, all the same. Even angry. “It was only after my husband died that the German painter Albert Oehlen discovered me. I was already exhibiting, but I wasn’t really recognized by the art world. Nothing would have happened if Albert Oehlen hadn’t invited me to exhibit in 2010 at the Essl Museum in Klosterneuburg, near Vienna.” But “I’ll tell you something. One Sunday afternoon, I was at the exhibition with friends in the room where my work was on display. A group arrived to take a guided tour and the young man who was working as a guide – I’ll never forget that moment – this kid, this little prick, came into the room and said: “No need to waste your time with these paintings, the painter only owes her presence here to connections.” That’s how we were treated. I wanted to slap him, but my friends discouraged me from doing so. I should have. I still regret not doing it today. »
What’s crazy is that the years have passed but it seems that nothing has really changed. “The director of the Leopold Museum in Vienna wanted to propose me to exhibit at the penultimate Venice Biennale,” Martha Jungwirth confided to Laure Adler. “He was part of the jury and thought that my work would find its place in this edition. But it turns out that the director of the Linz museum opposed it, saying: “But why invite her? She was married to a museum director.” If these are artistic criteria, explain them to me! Coming from art professionals, members of such a prestigious jury, this is an attitude that seems to me much more serious and shocking… than coming from me, right? Let no one reproach me after this for liking Martha Jungwirth for the wrong reasons.
Besides, my reasons are really artistic in fact. How can you not fall for a contemporary artist who puts the drawing of a dishwasher on the same level as that of a New York building? If when talking about her Indesit series, some of whose drawings were exhibited at Documenta 5, she remembers precisely that she started it on April 6, 1974, it is no coincidence. “In 1974, I went to New York for the first time. The desire to do this series of drawings came from an architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that included drawings by Mies van der Rohe. These drawings really fascinated me, and the memory of this city, all of this overwhelmed me. When I got home, I opened the dishwasher and the interior appeared to me as an architectural construction. If I hadn’t seen New York and Mies van der Rohe’s drawings, I would never have looked at the dishwasher in this way, because it is an object without aesthetic value. But, through the gaze, we can transform everything. Our mind works by association of ideas, and then something banal becomes something completely different.” Isn’t that artistic?
In any case, I no longer look at my dishwasher in the same way since I devoured this interview with Martha Jungwirth. I understand that she works with what is imprinted on her retina, with the traces that what she reads, lives or watches leaves there. Like Manet’s asparagus or Baselitz’s deformed feet. She also quotes De Kooning, Joan Mitchell… Laure Adler talks to her about Louise Bourgeois, Marlène Dumas… And I understand her just as much when she confides that she can no longer draw on the floor because she now has too much trouble getting up! You see what I mean? Martha Jungwirth is an absolutely touching human being. So I'm sure that if I can one day see her paintings "in real life", they will touch me too.
Article written by Valibri en Roulotte
Illustration: Martha Jungwirth
Untitled, from the series Australidelphiens
(Ohne Titel, aus der Serie Australidelphia), 2020
Oil on paper, mounted on canvas
241.5 x 330.9 cm
Private collection, London
© Martha Jungwirth, Bilbao, 2024
Photo Charles Duprat