Wright of Derby : From the Shadows @ National Gallery, London

Joseph Wright of Derby, Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, 1768

The Wright of Derby exhibition at the National Gallery in London is small, glowing, and, on the day that I visited, all but empty. National Gallery visitors will be familiar with Joseph Wright of Derby's  Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump (1768) as it is one of the many treasures on permanent display. The painting is arguably his most complex of those in the current exhibition as it encapsulates all of the themes and concerns that preoccupied him throughout his oeuvre. The lecturer performing a scientific experiment to an audience with differing levels of ambivalence, fascination, wonder, disgust, and trepidation takes up Wright's concerns of looking and the role of light as central to the spectacles of entertainment that were so in vogue in the second half of the eighteenth century. Film scholars have always been fascinated by this painting because it is cinematic in its bringing to life of a narrative about life and death through the use of artificial light. The boy in the background is also a key figure in his creation of a tension that runs through many of Write of Derby's paintings: the conflict between natural and artificial light put into play as he opens the curtain to reveal the moon.

Joseph Wright of Derby, Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight, 1765

Wright of Derby is also said to have been influenced by Caravaggio, but like Georges De La Tour, Wright of Derby using different kinds of light to meet very different ends from those explored by Caravaggio. For Caravaggio, light often had a mystical or religious significance, and for Wright of Derby, in his paintings, light was not only artificially produced, but even when the source is not visible, it is clear that it is realist. There is no transcendence or spiritual elevation in Wright's paintings. Similarly, for Wright, light is an experiment, measuring time, whether it is the transience of life or the structures given to us by the light of the natural world. Light creates small, intimate worlds, caverns in which scientists perform experiments, blacksmith's work, and children look on, sometimes fascinated, and at others, repelled by what they see.

Joseph Wright of Derby, An Academy by Lamplight, 1769

In keeping with his interest in education in his time, Wright often painted scenes from the academy, in which students and teachers appear to be learning technique. Like the Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump, the looks of the figures in other works are characteristically going in different directions, creating crossed sight lines, multiple centres of a painting, and suggesting movement where there is none. This type of scattering of sight lines is characteristically cinematic, used to create character, tension, and narrative. In Wright's paintings it also creates isolation, where each figure is alone, perhaps looking outward as well as inward, but always in their own world. Thus, again unlike Caravaggio, in Wright's paintings, we see multiple types of looking in a single image. It is not only about spectacle and modern regimes of looking thanks to entertainment, but there is also a more traditional introspection.

Joseph Wright of Derby, The Alchymist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone, 1795

In another tension set up by Wright in many of the paintings, very public moments of display are often made intimate and secret thanks to the light and figures needing to huddle around the experiment. Or not. In The Alchymist in Search of the Philosopher's Stone,1795, the boys in the workshop are not even looking at the alchemist's discovery of phosphorous while he is astounded at his discovery. The scene takes place in a dark, shadowy workshop, but it is we, not the boys who are invited into the protagonist's experiment. This opening out to the viewer is also a common occurrence of Wright's paintings, yet another sign of his interest in modes of looking, regimes of visuality and the rise of optical entertainments, such as the magic lantern, being developed in his midst. 

Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher giving that lecture on the Orrery
in which a Lamp is put in the place of the sun, 1766

The exhibition text claims that Wright of Derby was guided into his particular focus thanks to the fact that he wanted to do something different from what others in his midst were doing. On arrival in London, he had to stand out from the crowd, particularly because, as a young man from Derby, rather than a born and bred Londoner, the doors were not always open to him. As a man with his pulse on the dramatic upheavals in his world, Wright's insight into the role of painting in the middle of these changes, was visionary. He moved painting into the realm of performance and spectacle, at a time when it could so easily have been over shadowed or even left behind by other media. 

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.