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.