Martha Jungwirth’s exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac Seoul, Looking the Goat in the Eye, marks the Austrian painter’s first solo presentation in South Korea. Recent works in oil paint and watercolour will be on view, showcasing the breadth of the artist’s sources of inspiration, as well as her idiosyncratic painting process, which she describes as a ‘dynamic space’ of ‘action and passion’.

Martha Jungwirth has been a central figure in the Austrian art scene for over six decades, but it is within the past 15 years that her vivid and expressive paintings have garnered universal acclaim and international attention. Neither figurative nor resolutely abstract, her works are firmly anchored in the world around her and draw on a variety of sources, from the artist’s travels to the media, as well as mythology and the history of art. All of these are described as ‘impulses’ by Jungwirth, which she channels onto the paper in ‘a flow undisturbed by reflection’. This embodied, visceral approach to painting is echoed in the palette of her works, which often feature bright shades of red, pink flesh tones and bruised magentas.

The late 18th- and early 19th-century Spanish painter Francisco de Goya has been of particular interest to Jungwirth in recent years. A number of her works draw on etchings and paintings by the artist, who has been described as both the last of the Old Masters and the forefather of European modern art. As their titles indicate, three of the large paintings on view in the exhibition are based on the early 19th-century work by Goya: The Burial of the Sardine (Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, Spain). Dancing revellers in white dresses can be discerned in Jungwirth’s paintings, echoing the central figures in Goya’s carnival scene. But Jungwirth’s subjects always remain beyond the easily identifiable, capturing instead the energy of the source image as channelled through the artist herself, her body and movements.

Jungwirth adopts a similarly experiential approach in her watercolours, which she often creates on the Malfluchten – or painting escapes – she undertakes around the world. The islands of Greece, in particular, have been a significant source of inspiration for the artist throughout her life, both for the light and colours of their landscapes and the rich history and mythology embedded in them. Jungwirth has spent many summers in the Cyclades archipelago, where she paints outside, experimenting with watercolours in response to her maritime surroundings. Splashes and swirls of paint bear witness to the artist’s intuitive approach to watercolours, which she allows to slide and coagulate upon water-repellent baking parchment.

The group of three works from 2019 presented in the exhibition refers to the island of Delos, as well as the Hellenic constellation of Aries, which is symbolised by a ram. Half-apparent in the horizontal watercolours, the motif resonates with several of the oil paintings on view, from which another horned creature seems to emerge. A manifestation of the devil in Christian imagery, the goat, named in the exhibition’s title, was often associated with witchcraft, and Goya depicted the creature in several satirical paintings and etchings. Jungwirth’s interpretation of the subject expands on the ambivalence of the creature, which in Goya’s work is at once menacing and absurd. Her invitation to confront it in the exhibition can be interpreted as a call to allow oneself to experience the kind of instinctive, unbridled creativity feared by those who accused women of witchcraft. Indeed, a similar approach to making seems to guide Jungwirth’s way of working.

As the artist explains in her poetic manifesto ‘The Ape in Me’ (1988), her paintings occupy an intuitive space that exists beyond the formation of recognisable images, 'before spoken language', 'before memory' and 'before the obtrusiveness of objects'. Jungwirth rejects perspective, conceptualism and metaphysical interpretation in favour of spontaneity and what she describes as ‘practical intelligence’ – where sensory perception results in movement rather than cognitive analysis, like in young children. The result is eruptive, with constellations of blotches of colour assembled into half-recognisable images which bear the trace of the artist’s body through scratches and finger marks. 

And yet her compositions never overwhelm the page. The whirling, dashing paint is tempered by the large expanses of ground Jungwirth leaves bare, allowing the grain of her chosen support to appear, for free space is as important to her as colour. She often uses handmade paper, old accounting books and the cardboard backing of picture frames, as though the painting were an event that has landed, by chance, on a pre-existing support, highlighting the suspension that characterises all of the artist’s work. Her paintings hang between the real world and the imagined, where the concrete materiality of paint translates into abstraction and the visceral is inextricably linked to the subjective. They are the result of a different epistemology guided by movement and perception that seeks to reverse what the artist describes as ‘the moment at the end of / primitive thinking at the age of seven when teachers / start drilling rules and drive out the fairy-tale age.’