FOR OVER SIXTY YEARS, Martha Jungwirth has fashioned a distinctive painterly language that she once described as the liberatory opposite of “rigid, binding reality.” Born in 1940 in Vienna, where she still lives, she was the only woman member of Wirklichkeiten (Realities), a loose association of artists who took their name after an eponymous 1968 exhibition at the Vienna Secession curated by art historian, journalist, and museum director Otto Breicha. By the time works from her large-format, experimental “Indesit” series, ca.
1974–76. were being shown at Documenta 6 in 1977, her works had begun to recall big-city infrastructures, bodily systems, and even iterative computer diagrams. Since then, the body—more precisely, kinesis—has been the roving core of Jungwirth’s practice: “Painting starts from a concurrence of outward movement, bodily movement, and inward movement,” she wrote.
Jungwirth’s new paintings are being shown at Venice ’s Galleria di Palazzo Cini through September 29. The exhibition, occupying the second floor of a palace overlooking the Canal Grande in the sestiere of Dorsoduro, comprises fifteen abstractions: a mix of oils on brown paper mounted on canvas, and oils on cardboard. The show’s setting is hardly neutral.
The museum’s lower floor contains the home and some of the historic art collection of industrialist and arts patron Vittorio Cini (1885–1977), a promoter of Benito Mussolini who briefly served as the Fascist dictator’.
