Image: Galeria Arte-Imagen, Hernani
Jungwirth’s practice lies between abstraction and figuration. For nearly five decades, she has explored the possibilities of watercolor and oil, with color, gesture and chance essential to a painting that intuitively transforms reality.
One of the fundamental stimuli for her artistic reorientation came from a stay in New York, which she visited with her husband, Alfred Schmeller, then director of Vienna’s 20er Haus, now Belvedere 21.
In New York, steam rising from the city’s sewers evoked associations for Jungwirth with Hades, oracles and the myths of ancient Greece, as well as with culinary processes. A work by Arshile Gorky and a large-format charcoal drawing by Mies van der Rohe, seen by the couple at MoMA, encouraged her decision to work on a large scale.
After returning to Vienna, she began the large-format drawing series ‘Indesit (Lavavajillas)’. Its technological grid structures become bone skeletons, while amorphous forms are invaded by figurative elements and graphic and painterly means overlap.
From 1993, her watercolor series ‘Spittelauer Lände’ took the antiaircraft towers in Augarten Park as its central motif, capturing the city’s weather, noise, movement and light. Jungwirth has said that the mushroom-shaped architecture of the World War antiaircraft towers was the series’ point of departure: powerful vertical axes for her painterly persistence, imposing and static in their indeterminacy.
