Geh Nicht Aus dem Zimmer

Thaddaeus Ropac presents an exhibition of works by Austrian artist Martha Jungwirth centred around a remarkable large-scale 131-part installation of drawings and paintings on paper interspersed with texts cut from newspapers - described by Bernard Blistene as a 'great frieze of unruly images' - created over the course of several years. This monumental work is accompanied by a selection of the artist's recent paintings, as well as a group of watercolours, the earliest of which date from the 1980s. The monumental work at the heart of the exhibition exemplifies the artist's diaristic approach to abstraction. She made its component drawings half-looking at the paper in an instinctive process resembling automatic writing, and they are hung on the wall page-by-page like an unbound, unravelling journal, stacked four high. In some, thoughts seethe across the page in the form of furtive notes and annotations in the artist's hand. There is a striking sense of confidentiality in Jungwirth's work; a sense that we are privy to a secret. The title of the exhibition, Geh nicht aus dem Zimmer (Don't leave your room), manifests this diaristic introspection. It refers to a poem by Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky that bears no title but is known by these opening words. Impassioned yet obstinate, it implores the reader: 'Don't leave your room. Pretend a cold in the head. / What could be more exciting than wallpaper, chair and bed?' It relates directly to the private and deeply personal painting process behind the 131 intimate works on paper, many of which Jungwirth made at twilight in front of the television. More than 30 years after their creation, Jungwirth has assembled them into a single composite artwork in order to confront herself once again with the transient impulses that generated them. "Don't leave your room. This is better left undone. You've got cheap smokes, so why should you need the sun? Nothing makes sense outside, happiness least of all. You may go to the loo but avoid the hall. Don't leave your room. Don't think of calling a taxi. Space consists of the hall and ends at the door; its axis bends when the meter's on. If your tootsie comes in - before she starts blabbing, undressing - throw her out of the door. Don't leave your room. Pretend a cold in the head. What could be more exciting than wallpaper, chair and bed? Why leave a room to which you will come back later, unchanged at best, more probably mutilated? Don't leave your room. There might be a jazzy number on the radio. Nude but for shoes and coat, dance a samba. Cabbage smell in the hall fills every nook and cranny. You wrote so many words; one more would be one too many. Don't ever leave your room. Let nobody but the room know what you look like. Incognito ergo sum, as substance informed its form when it felt despair. Don't leave the room! You know, it's not France out there. Don't be an imbecile! Be what the others couldn't be. Don't leave the room! Let furniture keep you company, vanish, merge with the wall, barricade your iris from the chronos, the eros, the cosmos, the virus." —Joseph Brodsky Jungwirth works intuitively, making works that convey a palpable sense of self, yet are far from absolute introspection. Though created in a context of sublime solitude, the narrative that unfolds on the wall is grounded in the real world, as testified to by the pages Jungwirth has cut out from the culture sections of newspapers to intersperse with her own drawings and paintings. They start art-historical conversations within the frieze itself - with the sewn-up scars of a fabric Louise Bourgeois head, or Rogier van der Weyden's sorrowful The Descent from the Cross - but also invite the viewer to imagine Jungwirth flicking through the newspaper as she works. Current affairs are among her key inspirations. In this multipart work, across a variety of media - ink, charcoal, watercolour, oil paint - figuration appears from amidst abstraction, before being concealed again. Faces, torsos, limbs and the digits of hands and feet surface from within flurries of lines: 'insistent lines - a combination of erasures and crossings-out [...] which scar the surface of the paper as figures emerge', as Blistene describes. Jungwirth's jerky strokes recall Asger Jorn's New Disfigurations or Arnulf Rainer's Overpaintings. Among the proliferation of drawings we find small paintings in which pools of colour become 'magmas, impastos that muddy the surface, interrupt the narrative and come to obliterate it,' as Blistene writes. Jungwirth's watercolours are just as elusive. Watercolour, the medium with which the artist commenced her painting career, is represented in the exhibition with a small group of works from the 1980s and 1990s. It is possible to understand Jungwirth's watercolours from this period, as curator and critic Thomas Mießgang has written, 'as a phenomenological approximation of those things which remain fleeting and evasive in their time-bound lack of contour.' Shapes and lines cluster together at the centre of the paper as if constructing something that never quite solidifies. They are both evasive and evasions: as Blistene writes, 'Jungwirth says that her paintings invite an escape: 'Malfluchten' . Listen to the sound of the word, don't look for a literal meaning. 'Fluchten' means 'to flee' in English.' 'There are frugal artists who make do with five cans of paint', Jungwirth says. 'That's not my way. I'm all about the nuance of color.' Her most recent paintings in oil testify to this, diving ever deeper into the subtleties of her signature palette of vivid pinks and bruised magentas while also investigating other tonal registers: cooler lilacs and blues; earthy greens, browns and oranges. 'I want to create out of abundance', Jungwirth explains, a position that aligns her approach to colour with her distinctive mark-making, where accumulating gestures remain like an index of her process. That same impulse finds its fullest expression in the central frieze, whose richness arises from acts of gathering, amassing and assembling.

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