“It is important to me that the process stays alive.” Painter Martha Jungwirth shares how she’s developed as an artist over the years and the importance of the encounters with the unfamiliar.
Martha Jungwirth has been interested in art and literature from a young age. ”My mother took me to museums, and I always got books and drawing materials. So I could keep myself busy. That was fun.” When she got older, she learned that there was an actual school where you’d make art – the academy. “I did not know that there was such a thing. There I could continue doing what I enjoyed.” Begging her parents and crying for a month finally convinced her parents to let her apply. She got in: “I had achieved my dream. We visited exhibitions and I felt like in paradise.”
Literature also remained a focal point for the young artist at school: “In order to get in touch with literature, the assistant asked the professor to buy books that we could read and illustrate.” Jungwirth describes this as “an intelligent approach.” She continues: “On the one hand, you get to know literature, and on the other hand, you learn to draw.”
After graduating from the art academy, Martha Jungwirth became even more familiar with other Austrian artists: “Arnulf Rainer, Wolfgang Hollegha, Josef Mikl, Markus Prachensky. That was how I imagined good painting at the time. That was a revelation.” The encounter made her crave “the free and the painterly.” She continues to explain: “Watercolor painting is my starting point. The fluid and the transparent – that is what defines my art.”
“Encountering the unfamiliar was always very stimulating and important for me.” Jungwirth stresses how important the process is: “I surely have ideas and a motif, but in the painting process, thing happen that I did not know before. It is important to me, that the process stays alive,” she continues: “Aesthetics is both a process of perception and an energetic process. And they must fit together.”
“It’s not about filling something up or completing it. The tension must remain readable.”
Martha Jungwirth, born in 1940 in Vienna, where she still lives and works, studied at the Academy of Applied Arts (1956–63) and later taught there from 1967–77. Early in her career, she received the Msgr. Otto Mauer Prize (1961), the Theodor Körner Prize (1964), and the Joan Miró Prize (1966). She co-founded the Viennese collective Wirklichkeiten (Realities), the only female member, and exhibited with the group until 1972. She participated in documenta 6 in Kassel (1977) and had a room dedicated to her work in a 2010 Essl Museum exhibition curated by Albert Oehlen. Major retrospectives followed at Kunsthalle Krems (2014), Kunstmuseum Ravensburg (2018), and the Albertina in Vienna in 2018, the same year she received the Oskar Kokoschka Prize. She has had a retrospective at Museum Liaunig (2020), followed by the Grand Austrian State Prize in 2021. Recent solo shows include Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2022), Guggenheim Bilbao (2024), Long Museum, Shanghai (2025) and Museum Jorn, Denmark (2025).
Martha Jungwirth was interviewed by Lucas Haberkorn in January 2025. The conversation took place in her studio in Vienna, Austria.
Camera: Mathias Lassen
Edit: Mathias Lassen
Produced by: Mathias Lassen for Museum Jorn in Silkeborg, Denmark.
Copyright: Museum Jorn, 2025. Shown by Louisiana Channel with kind permission.
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