Martha Jungwirth: Panta rhei

With the solo exhibition of Martha Jungwirth (*1940, Vienna), the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg is presenting what is up to now the most comprehensive exhibition in Germany of one of the most important Austrian artists. Jungwirth’s vigorously colored visual worlds oscillate between gestural abstraction and figuration. Her watercolors and oil paintings, ranging from small formats to monumental dimensions, convey the results of a complex process of transformation in which reality is not reproduced but is instead transferred into an independent, atmospheric equivalent rendered in compositions of color and form. This survey includes key works from the 1970s until today, with a particular focus on the watercolors whose spectrum of coloristic variations Jungwirth has been exploring ever since the beginning of her creative output. In early 2018, she was awarded the renowned Oskar Kokoschka Prize for her lifetime oeuvre, which the Albertina in Vienna presented in a retrospective.

Martha Jungwirth’s impressive paintings are sensory notations of what she has seen and experienced. The underlying impulses are derived from both impressions of journeys or friends and depictions of political events, art-historical paintings or Greek mythology. The interplay between past memory, current sense perception and emotion gives rise to pulsing spaces of color in which objective references partially come to light. In 1994, the artist remarked: “When outer movement, bodily motion and inner movement coincide, and when this simultaneous concurrence is successful, the painting commences.” Jungwirth’s intuitive, dynamic manner of painting includes controlled contingency and always remains visible. Drops, rivulets and splotches of paint are part of the pictorial composition and point towards the process by which the work has been created. The title of the exhibition, Panta rhei (“Everything Flows”), takes up the atmosphere of fluidity and openness that characterizes her work. The aphorism attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus describes the essence of existence as constant change and movement. In the alternation between fullness and emptiness, between opaque density and ephemeral dissolution, Jungwirth is able to incorporate various levels of perception in her painting and to transfer them into dynamic compositions of color. In order to truly encounter the works of this artist, one must open to the risk of losing oneself within them.

Curator and director: Ute Stuffer, curatorial assistent: Kristina Groß 

Lecture
Thursday, January 17, 2018, 7pm
“Martha Jungwirth: Unclasped Grasping”
by Prof. Dr. Jörg Heiser (Director, Institute for Art in Context, Berlin University of the Arts; art critic for the international art magazine frieze, the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, FAZ) et al.

Jörg Heiser will speak about the independent-minded oeuvre of Martha Jungwirth and describe parallels to the painters Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) and Asger Jorn (1914–1973).

Catalogue 
Parallel to the exhibition, a catalogue is being published by the Verlag für moderne Kunst, with texts by Thomas Mießgang, Kristina Groß, Martha Jungwirth and Alfred Schmeller, as well as an interview between Martha Jungwirth and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

About the Kunstmuseum Ravensburg
The Kunstmuseum Ravensburg was opened in 2013; it is the first certified museum in the passive-house construction style. Designed by the Stuttgart architectural firm Lederer + Ragnarsdóttir + Oei, the museum has been awarded such honors as the German Architecture Prize in 2013; it was declared “Museum of the Year 2015” by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). The basis for the museum is the Selinka Collection, assembled over four decades by the former advertising consultant Peter Selinka (1924–2006) together with his wife. The collection includes works of German Expressionism as well as by the artist groups CoBrA and SPUR; it complements a program of temporary exhibitions dedicated to the art of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Contact 
T +49 (0)751 82 810
kunstmuseum@ravensburg.de                                                                                             

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