Kathleen Jacobs @ Karsten Greve

Kathleen Jacobs, Storm, 2023

I stumbled on this lovely group exhibition at Karsten Greve on my way home from the Martha Jungwirth exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac. Despite including pieces by very well known artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Pierre Soulages, and Cy Twombly, the discovery for me were the paintings of American artist Kathleen Jacobs. In fact, it was her abstract grey painting seen through the street window that templed me inside. 

Jacobs time consuming process of wrapping trees such that
canvases come alive through interaction with the weather 

Jacobs tends to use a single palette that nevertheless results in a myriad of colors and levels of transparency thanks to her lengthy process conceived to weather the paint. Jacobs begins by stretching  canvases and wrapping them around trees, and then, over months, sometimes years, applies layers of paint. In turn, when enough pigment stays on the canvas, she begins to rub it like paper over a woodblock. The imprint is then touched up in her studio, colors added, highlighting the shapes of bark, pulling out the contours of grain. For exhibition, the canvas is mounted and turned horizontally.

Kathleen Jacobs, Lumen, 2018

Even without knowing of Jacobs' painstaking and unique process, it's possible to see that her paintings are made over time. The paint is visibly diluted by weather and absorbed by the canvas until it is nothing but surface. Similarly, though it is not possible to pinpoint the precise process simply from looking, the final paintings resemble nature. We see in them skies, seas, clouds. That said, there is always something ambiguous, something we can't quite place because above all, they are, like all abstraction, inviting us to see something that might not be in the painting. Once they are explained, they hover between the natural landscape and a fascinating revision of woodcuts - by which she is influenced. Simultaneously, the paintings' contemporary relevance is unmistakeable as they are literally tree hugging works that make a gentle cry for the preservation of the forests without which the paintings would not be able to be made.

Kathleen Jacobs small works on exhibition
Galerie Karsten Greve

On the gallery's upper floor, a series of small works line the wall. They are delicate and peaceful, reflective and meditative. As often is the case with paintings of this size, small opens out to large expansive worlds. Similarly, it is in these small works on the upper floor that we see the texture of the canvas become more prominent than the paint to the point where color resembles the veins of granite or marble. To be sure however, it is not the size, but the process that ensures they are quietly revealing their substance.

Martha Jungwirth, Geh nicht aus dem Zimmer @ Thaddaeus Ropac

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025

Martha Jungwirth's unique abstract paintings are often at odds with what she says about them. The title of the exhibition being a case in point. "Don't leave the bedroom" is the first line of a poem by Joseph Brodsky, about hunkering down and staying home. While her painting is intimately connected to her body and expressionistic, its brilliant colour and sensitive form reaches out to all of us in the world beyond the bedroom.

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025

Jungwirth is also quoted as saying that, for her, painting is about abundance and the plenitude of colour, and while we see this in her use of bright, intense colour, some of her paintings are as spare as any abstract paintings we would ever see. Strokes over brown paper are her signature. On exhibition in the first floor gallery, a burst of yellow paint on clean cardboard is bold and energetic without need for the distraction of other elements. Similarly, though the colours are rich, glorious and often filled with joy, the most striking of her works are arguably those in a single colour palette. The vivid fuschias are resplendent under Thaddaeus Ropac's skylight, but the paintings are also thoughtful and reflective. 

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025
Detail

Perhaps the varied significance of Jungwirth's paintings are not contradictory? Maybe these different aspects of the same painting sit comfortably together? For example, the vivid and confident colours contribute to the paintings' gentle femininity, their inwardness and simultaneous struggle against expectations. They are not only boistrous and bold. Indeed, there is something else about these paintings that makes them soft and delicate, intimate, beyond colour.

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025

Jungwirth says that her painting is intuitive, but what does that mean when translated into paint? She explains it further in this lovely video on the gallery website. Jungwirth literally reacts to something she hears or sees and the emotions flow through her body onto the page or paper. This spontaneity and the resultant traces in paint and pencil that allow us to see the artist's hand at work remind me of Cy Twombly's large canvases, even though the end result of Jungwirth's looks quite different. The similarity is in the intuition that drives the image - looking at brush strokes that resemble writing in paint, we see both artists in process, moving across the support, thinking, improvising, suggesting as they go. The intense coagulations of paint that arise when Jungwirth stops —or perhaps they are the squirts of paint coming from the tube that enable her to begin? —are moments of pause, interruption, and simultaneously, potentially heightened emotion. Similar markings can be found on Twombly's paintings as he moves across and around his canvas.

Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2025

Even though Jungwirth's strokes are entirely abstract, we see the physicality of the drawing and painting. Witness, for example, the different pressures she applies to the tool, the brush, the dirty finger prints around the edges of the brown cardboard surfaces that she uses as support. In some of the drawings, we also see traces of a face, a body part, an eye, suggestions of a hand. But it's not so much the forms discovered in the drawings as it is the recording of the hand as it moves over a page that centre Jungwirth's painting and drawing in her body. It's as though we are watching the body move, as though she translates her inner responses to events into images. Perhaps, even more than can be said of Twombly's paintings, Jungwirth's are made to be felt, sensed, before they are intellectually understood.

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The paintings on display at Thaddaeus Ropac's Marais gallery are inspired by the Brodsky poem, inspirations which then appear in drawings, doodlings made at home, in front of the television, showing current events, others' artwork. The drawings are Jungwirth's intuitive response. She calls the drawings diaristic, made by only half looking at the paper. Jungwirth draws and paints on paper, meaning that the works are fast, and enjoy a fluidity thanks to the even surface of the cardboard / paper. In this, the paintings themselves are like drawings, immediate, with minimal temporal duration, expressions of the body. They are in this sense, automatic writing in paint. Her paintings are marks that arrive before consciousness.

Georges de la Tour, Entre Ombre et Lumière @ Musée Jacquemart-André

Georges de la Tour, Le nouveau né, c. 1645

It was no surprise to see the extraordinary creations in and of light in Georges de la Tour's paintings now on exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André. De la Tour has a reputation as the seventeenth-century master of artificial light. Even if his paintings are rarely shown, the proliferation of copies and fakes makes them ironically familiar. Other than his crafting of light, perhaps the most exciting element of these paintings was the exaggerated intimacy of the scenes, the way that figures hovered around candle or torch light in small, enclosed spaces, always at night time, always in meditative poses. Even when the figures are in action, they are stopped still, reflecting, thinking, as if caught in a photograph. 

Georges de la Tour, La Madeleine Penitante, c. 1635-40

There was something about these paintings that made me see them as well ahead of their time. The use of light as more than illumination of a scene, often becoming the very subject of the scene, such that many other details of the paintings fade into the background. The fact that all the women, whether it is a religious figure or a peasant, look to be the same model hardly matters once we are pulled into the private world of her thoughts, effulgent in an illuminated space. That said, their pensive faces and often deliberately positioned hands are quietly expressive, even if we cannot access what those emotions are.

Georges de la Tour, La Femme à la Puce, 1632-1635

As the line between secular and religious becomes blurred in the paintings, it hardly matters if we are looking at the Virgin and St Anne or a pregnant peasant woman, a contemplative villager or a saint, La Madeleine or a prostitute. What matters is that all the figures appear to engaged in a transcendent experience and invite us into their private world. Though de la Tour was clearly a man committed to the scriptures, particularly as they were represented in painting, he was more interested in composition, lighting, and creating internal emotional worlds through soft orange glowing flames. 

Georges de la Tour, Les Joueurs des dès, 1651

So little is known about de la Tour during his lifetime. From records, it is know that he was born and lived in Lunéville, a small town in Lorraine. Where he learned, not just to paint, but to create worlds of mystery and contemplation through candle light, is itself a mystery. While historians continue to debate the unknowns of de la Tour's life, the lack of information also means that we are free to let our imaginations roam as we contemplate the paintings. There is widespread opinion that he must have visited Italy and been exposed to Caravaggio's painting - because of the light - but Caravaggio was doing something very different with light. Caravaggio's light and shadow was conceived and executed to energize, to sweep his figures into scenic action, and create perspectival lines. De la Tour used it for the very opposite reasons: to create secret, inward worlds. I saw a number of other resonances, for example, El Greco's long delicate fingers and hands placed in strategic positions, as well as his figures huddled around a flame in paintings such as An Allegory with a Boy Lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool, 1577-79. 

El Greco, An Allegory with a Boy Lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool, 1577-79

There is also something about these works that made me think that de la Tour was the Manet of his day, painting people on the street as the result of their environment, in unforgiving worlds. His paintings of old peasants against grey backgrounds, in what look to be theatre costumes reminded me of Manet's street portraits. Like Manet, de la Tour seemed to have empathy for those who had been left out of the prosperity of their time, giving them dignity and personality through painting where they may have had little in life.

Georges de la Tour, Vieillard, and, Vieille Femme, 1618-19

Though the Musée Jacquemart-André's exhibition spaces are themselves small and at times too intimate as viewers are squeezing past each other moving between rooms, the hanging of the paintings was quite wonderful. That said, the lighting often conflicted with the light given off by the painting. Each painting has been lit to ensure that the only place from which to look at it without glare is directly in front. However, this was not always possible with the crowds. Nevertheless, a patience with the crowds will bring the rich rewards of these quiet meditative works.