Jeppe Curth: 0:00

Hi and welcome to the Collector's Edge for Nordic Art Partners. In this episode, we will explore the work and career of Martha Jungwirth, an Austrian artist known for expressive and dynamic paintings. With me today is, as usual, our art expert, N Robinson, and I'm your host, jib, let's get started.

Nicholas Robinson: 0:20

It is with Alex Rotter at 400 million Selling here at Christie's. 400 million dollars is the bid and the piece is sold. We've all heard about it. Sometimes it's front page news Important works of art are being sold for incredible sums of money. But can you get involved and become a part of the exclusive club yourself, and how do you get started while avoiding buying the wrong things? That's exactly what this podcast is about. This is the Collector's Edge from Nordic Art Partners, a podcast for those of you interested in the mechanics of the art industry, want advice about putting money into art, or simply want to buy something for your walls, to beautify your surroundings. Whatever your objectives, it is possible to put money into art wisely, to be considered thoughtful and well informed in your choices and actions. Welcome to the art of collecting with an eye for curated beauty and practical value.

Nicholas Robinson: 1:27

Hi Nick, hi Nick, hi, Jeppe, how are you doing Very well. Thank you and you.

Jeppe Curth: 1:31

Yeah, I'm good, thank you.

Nicholas Robinson: 1:33

Good to hear. So, who are we going to talk about today? Today, we're going to talk about Martha Jorwitz, an Austrian painter.

Jeppe Curth: 1:42

Great, and why?

Nicholas Robinson: 1:44

Well, why do we talk about any artists on this pod? Because we love them because we love them, we believe in them, we buy them, we sell them, we collect them. We talk about the things that we feel are relevant to our personal and professional interests, where those two areas coalesce yes we do so.

Jeppe Curth: 2:06

As always, can you walk us through? Martha Jung was beginning of the art world. What helped shape her distinctive style?

Nicholas Robinson: 2:13

I can. She was born in 1940 in Vienna and from 1956 to 1963 she studied at the University of Applied Arts there. In 1961, whilst still a student, she was awarded the Monsignor Otto Maurer Prize, which was followed in 1964 by the Theodor Koerner Prize, both of which are somewhat local prizes for up-and-coming talents. But in 1966, she was awarded the Juan Miro Prize, which I suppose has a greater sort of prestige internationally, which of course was awarded in Spain. So after she graduated, she taught at the Academy of Applied Arts there in Vienna, her alma mater um, for a decade, from 1967 to 1977.

Nicholas Robinson: 3:07

And then, um, in the middle of the 1970s, she began to create these vibrantly colored, somewhat idiosyncratic watercolors, um. And this early work was to demonstrate a strong affinity for the visceral, a strong affinity for the visceral, energetic abstraction that had been, you know, the dominant trend in abstract painting throughout the 20th century. It had a very raw emotive quality which I guess we can closely relate to American abstract expressionist, which had also come to be termed action painting, but also was grounded in the European informel, which was a term invented in the early 1950s by the French critic Michel Tapier, and it was largely designed to encompass different strands of abstraction that he was recognizing. Nowadays it's more closely associated with a particularly European trend in abstraction. Artists like Fautrier Hartung, mathieu Walsh, pierre Soulages, mathieu Walsh, pierre Soulages so her work perhaps can be viewed as somewhat bridging these two tendencies. But at this time, in the middle of the 1970s, pop art was still a very dominant aesthetic Came to prominence in the early 1960s, but still very much holding sway.

Nicholas Robinson: 4:46

Minimalism another key development during the preceding decade, characterized by its very rational principles, a lot of rule-based art. That was still also a very strongly influential type of practice and at this time minimalism was evolving into different strands which included some highly conceptual approaches, perhaps epitomized by artists like Larry Poons or Paul Jenkins, kind of a decadent, late phase of this movement. And when you look at work by these artists from this period it tends to seem actually rather dated and very much of this time. So even in Vienna, painting had been co-opted by a movement, a group called the Viennese Actionists, which was a short-lived movement in the art scene there. It was very transgressive, super aggressive, very masculine, to develop painting but also develop it through various strands of art that were increasingly prevalent around the world, things like performance art, happenings, body art, so quite similar to kinds of things that were taking place with the various offshoots of fluxus around Europe.

Nicholas Robinson: 6:21

So at this time there was probably a tendency for a quieter, more highly personal vocabulary of abstraction to get a little bit squeezed to the margins In America. Also, in Italy, there was a tremendously prominent artist called Cy Twombly and I suppose one might consider his highly personal lexicon of mark making a little bit analogous to what Martha was doing. At the same time and during this phase, twombly, who'd been working since the 1950s, was perhaps coming into a very sophisticated phase, I think, of his Roman notes, works of 1970, natural history works from 1974, etc. So that's, that's the sort of backdrop in terms of the kinds of art production that was taking place and the context in which we can view the environment she was, she was working in thanks, nick um.

Jeppe Curth: 7:20

Can you also walk us through the physical properties, like what do they look like, which materials is she working with and also a bit about her process?

Nicholas Robinson: 7:31

Yes, of course Her work was most often executed on paper. Early work is typically characterized by being on this sort of quite heavy paper Um, and then, in the more recent past, the paper that she uses, has is a little more of a material feature of the work. Sometimes it's homemade, sometimes it's recycled from other things, repurposed um, uh, surface, purposed surface for her to paint on, and she would paint on these pieces of paper and then subsequently mount them on canvas. So often you have a sort of a perimeter of the paper that is visible within the external boundary of the canvas surface, so cut a little bit irregularly and not cleanly aligned. So you see this sort of slightly irregular or misshapen edge, certainly a kind of asymmetry when you look at the paper and the way that it is visible, um, on the on on the canvas. So her, her process uh, was always she's always considered it a very, very direct sort of gestural rhythm involving the body, and the main things that she focuses on making are colored shapes, uh, or color colored fields and colored lines, and these always tend to float in quite an open field. So you have a certain sparseness and a certain quality of the pictorial surface not really being filled in but there's not a background to speak of, just really empty swathes of paper against which these coloured blotches are set against.

Nicholas Robinson: 9:29

And as her work has developed and evolved, she's become more and more sort of interested in concentrating on that which really excites her, not only about her subject matter but also about the nature of her mark making. And I should say that her work alternates a lot between pure abstraction and figuration. The works are even the figurative works. They're not very sort of tightly formed figures, they're very gestural figures, very open figures nonetheless, but they still echo physical forms that we will recognize. But as she's developed her process, she's sought more and more to condense her marks, whilst sort of ridding herself of anything that she would describe as superfluous. So the objective is not to end up with a sort of a filled in picture but an open one where all of the marks are sort of very well chosen and somehow articulate or punctuate the surface, with both the sort of surface and the marks being very much in balance with each other.

Nicholas Robinson: 10:39

And the other key thing about the way she works is that once a mark is made it cannot be unmade or glossed over or edited. So even though she works or has the sort of appearance of working quite quickly. There still has to be a certain consideration with the mark that she makes. So the fact that no editing takes place will necessitate a certain kind of painterly decisiveness, because all traces of her movements will remain visible in the finished painting. So it is also the works become a very intimate index of her process, of her working, reflecting very much the way that she and her body have interacted with that, with that surface. And this is this is a very key idea for her in the way that she makes the paintings and in the way that she wants the paintings to be perceived A certain kind of visibility of this process, the various sort of essential nature of the lines and the blotches and the subsequent tension that arises from them, as a counterpoint to the space or openness she really wants that the viewer is able to discern or sort of deduce her process from looking at the work and determine the kind of sort of energy or whatever she's sort of physically committing to it.

Nicholas Robinson: 12:05

So this is how she goes about making her marks of energy or whatever she's sort of physically committing to it. So this is how she goes about making her marks, and then she's often kind of wrestling with the notion of when a work is finished and she describes as her working life has matured, how she has learned to resist the urge to apply a kind of a perfect crowning mark to the work. So this kind of also results in the process of the work carrying on even after it's finished, because she sort of decided to stop, but of course she sort of feels that perhaps she could have continued. So this process of reading and completing the work continues, even in the efforts of the viewer to look at and consider the work. So, in terms of the palette that she uses, these sort of main blocks that she that she distributes across the surface, or energy centers as she describes them, um, for a long time there's been a very strong emphasis on on the color red and all of its many variations.

Nicholas Robinson: 13:08

So she will, uh, she will mitigate the red by sort of diluting it, by blending it it a little bit. So you get these, you know these wonderful purples and pinks, and what she tries to do is she tries to squeeze any given color, in this case red, sort of to the limit of its expressive range, and then she has to make a determination about how far she pushes it before. The palette or color choice sort of degenerates into becoming insipid, which is something that she's keen to avoid. And she's done something similar with yellows, which she has described as sometimes toxic and malignant. So she's of course very interested in the expressive potential of the colour or the tone of that colour itself. And then she's also done a group of works with a very heavy dark forest green, which are works that are related to to the Congo, which of course are designed to echo the very thick forest that one experiences there.

Nicholas Robinson: 14:23

So, yeah, um, that's a little bit how she goes about making, making the paint. She's very interested in the. In the in the seventies she made a lot of watercolors and in in more recent times she's gravitated more towards oil paint. She's very interested in oil paints materiality. She's very interested in its density and how compact you can make these marks, how you can build them up and then, through varying kinds of strokes, sometimes denser, sometimes heavy and pasto, and then they're very sort of a little bit scrappy, scumbled with her fingers. Um other kinds of actions that she performs on the surface.

Jeppe Curth: 15:02

I've also noticed that her very large works also seems to be on paper. Is this a medium she always uses, and are there any works on canvas?

Nicholas Robinson: 15:13

Well, the paintings are always on paper, but then they are, after they're completed, they're mounted on canvas. And the reason that she works on paper isn't because she doesn't want her paintings to be paintings on canvas. It's much more related to her process, related to her process, um, and, and I guess it comes a little from her initial grounding as an artist who worked primarily on paper with watercolor Um, but now, when she's making these large format works, the, the, the reason for choosing paper is because it actually, for her, enhances her process and the way it feels for her to make a painting, the action of making a brushstroke, and that that is because a? Uh, the paper has a an entirely smooth surface, and her sort of sensitivity to the? Um, to making a gesture, to making a mark on the surface, is such that when she would try and do the same thing on a directly onto a canvas, she would notice that the, the nap or the weave of the fabric surface, however fine it might be, that this would create a certain friction with the bristles of the brush. And this is something that she's keen to eradicate completely so that she can get this sort of fully fluid motion of her brush stroke onto the surface. So, of course, this I mean I alluded to this at the beginning too with these sort of slightly oddly shaped, irregular pieces of paper mounted onto these perfectly rectilinear canvas surfaces. So it does give them a little bit of a non-conformist appearance in some ways.

Nicholas Robinson: 16:59

And, materially, some of the supports she uses are even sort of recycled, reused paper or cardboard and, as a result, they can appear a bit tattered or shabby, non-precious, certainly not conventionally beautiful, but, to her, beautiful because they already have a, a built-in history that they wear and they show, um, a little bit like the, the, the Japanese, uh, wabby, sabby idea, I guess, um, and the other kind of interesting uh effect, if you like, of of utilizing paper as a medium, as a support, is that what, now that she, she, um, makes oil paints on these surfaces, the oil content of the paint itself and also the linseed oil with, with which, uh, the pigments are thinned, it means that these, these marks, can often sort of bleed outwards onto the paper, a little bit like chromatography, but this is, you know, a medium that she's continually experimenting with, to the extent that, in 2017, she actually began to rip up heavy paper that she had had covering the floor of her studio for years, and so these surfaces that became her painting surfaces had already accumulated various layers of paint, splashes, grime, even footprints onto them.

Nicholas Robinson: 18:25

So even when she began to make her paintings, the surface that she was addressing was already far from pristine.

Jeppe Curth: 18:32

Okay, nick. So what about her themes? What themes does she explore?

Nicholas Robinson: 18:36

Well, her paintings sort of oscillate between abstraction and figuration, and we've learned that she conveys the tactile sensations of painting through her brushstrokes, her splatters, splashes, scrapes and pours. But even though all of her works have a very palpable sense of immediacy and improvisation, actually a very sort of sense of an intuitive approach to making marks, she does begin each painting with what she calls a conceptual pretext, and this is essentially what becomes the theme of any given work. And it can begin with an encounter with an external model, kind of a source idea, can also be something, a photograph from a newspaper or a magazine, so. So she starts off with a central idea and the painting then emerges during the painting process that I've described, which she actually herself describes as an adventure. So, before the intuition and the gesture comes some measure of calculation, which of course completely transforms this original source into something very different. But if we want to break down her themes, I guess we can characterize them as one of them is very sort of personal, autobiographical, very kind of literal, physical depiction of the act of making a painting, like a visual diary that traces her physical engagement with the creative process process. So, because this process is fully honest, without the editing that I mentioned open, transparent.

Nicholas Robinson: 20:19

These works then are considered by her as extensions of herself or her physical person, and she has. She says drawing and painting are a movement that runs through me, so that that can come to summarize this idea. But other themes that she's been interested in exploring are art history she's been very interested in the work of Goya, travel stories from Greek mythology Also, sometimes contemporary political events are very moving to her. A few years ago there were some horrific bushfires in Australia. Thousands of animals were killed in the wild burned, and she was extremely moved by this, having always had a strong affinity with animals. So she made a whole series of paintings showing these sorts of ossified animals that had suffered in this blaze, and these, of course, were much more figurative paintings. So these are the themes. That would be a good way to summarize the kinds of topics that interest her.

Jeppe Curth: 21:33

So, when advising clients to buy works by Martha Youngwood, how do you situate her current art market trends and historical context?

Nicholas Robinson: 21:42

Well, it's very interesting and I think in a way her work appeals to us because we really admire what she does. And even though she's a mature artist who's been working for a long time, even though she's a, you know, a mature artist who's been working for a long time, it's only in the relatively recent past that her work has achieved an international audience. And I think, you know, often we look at artists who have been distinguished by a really long and consistent practice but, for whatever reason, the art market at large has not fully recognized that, and for quite a long time that was the case with Martha Youngworth. Now it's no longer the case. Her work is now becoming somewhat expensive, but we can get to that. But in terms of situating her work, well, we've described her work as part of this sort of expressive painting trajectory that originally began in the 1970s. I mean, there are other artists who you could say are somewhat similar to that. An American painter who's also enjoying a renaissance, who was also responsible for a very distinctive personal vocabulary of abstraction, was Joan Snyder, and she's also becoming much more recognized and returning to prominence. She actually had a much more distinguished career in the 1970s than Martha Youngworth did, but that could also be down to the fact that she's American rather than Austrian, which for all intents and purposes is still a relatively small country and a little bit off the beaten track when it comes to the main centers of art production and consumption.

Nicholas Robinson: 23:31

But I think that, so that would be one parallel career, I guess. I think that, uh, so that would be one parallel career, I guess, um. But I look at other artists um who have you know, really come to have massive amounts of of recognition just because of their uh, the quality of their work, the distinctive vision that they, that they um managed to communicate. Um, joan Mitchell would be an artist, I suppose, who who of course predates Youngworth but also for years was overlooked, probably mainly due to the fact that she was a woman working in an extremely male world. Linda Benglis, another, another expressive uh artist um who who kind of almost also treads a fine line between figuration and abstraction in a funny kind of way, um also much more receiving her due these days for her achievement and her contribution than was formerly the case and her contribution than was formerly the case.

Nicholas Robinson: 24:35

So so I guess, you know, I, I see, I see Martha's work as as something that is very unique and sort of unto itself qualitatively but also somehow can be, can be conflated a little bit with some of these other artists, because of course, you know, trends in a market can often be recognized and identified when they take place with different, different practitioners. Um, I I mentioned Twombly earlier too. I mean, I think that her very deft and delicate marks, uh, which are juxtaposed with much heavier passages of paint, uh, thickly applied impasto ando and various ways of applying that paint, I think there are many parallels with the gestural mark making that Martha Youngworth is known for and the way of painting that Cy Twombly has actually become internationally celebrated for and in fact regarded as one of the greatest painters of the second half of the 20th century. Thanks, nick.

Jeppe Curth: 25:42

Can we also talk about prices and which galleries she's represented by presented at the Essel Museum.

Nicholas Robinson: 25:48

Uh, and this was noteworthy really only for the fact that the show was curated by Albert Erlen, who is one of the more celebrated um practitioners of of gestural abstraction in the 21st century, um, and and has become, you know, a massive, a massive star with, with incredibly high prices, um. So so the fact that her work was recognized champions, perhaps you might say by him, that was a bit of an eye opener. And then, in 2014, um, a full retrospective of her work was held at the Kunsthalle Krems. 2018, she received the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, which is the highest distinction that can be received for an artist in Austria. That same year, there was a solo exhibition, quite a wide ranging, extensive show of her work at the Albertina in Vienna, which is a very prestigious museum there. And then in 2021, she was awarded the Grand Austrian State Prize, which I suppose is you could describe as an outstanding lifetime achievement award. And currently there is a major retrospective of her work at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. So her recognition amongst institutions has been growing and her very singular approach to painting has been more and more recognised over the last decade, plus In terms of her commercial exhibiting career.

Nicholas Robinson: 27:41

In 2017, she started showing with Modern Art in London, which is a great gallery and often really recognized as a place that is really good at identifying interesting talents, sometimes even somewhat historically obscured ones. She showed with Fergus McCaffrey, which is a really nice gallery in New York which specializes somewhat in actually Japanese abstraction. But anyway, he also recognized that her work was deserving of a wider audience and granted her a number of exhibitions. And since 2021, she has been represented exclusively by Thaddeus Ropak. She has been represented exclusively by today's Ropac, and Ropac, of course, is a extremely eminent dealer with premises in Salzburg, in Paris, in London and in Seoul in South Korea. And since she has been working with Ropac, her prices have gone up a lot on the primary market and have remained somewhat consistently there for the last few years.

Nicholas Robinson: 28:51

And just to give a few examples a, a large painting that is maybe two and a half meters uh across and maybe one and a half two meters tall, would cost around 300,000 euros today, something of one meter, thereabouts one meter by 70, 80 centimeters. That would be around 150,000 euros. And then, because of the somewhat haphazard sizing of these pieces of paper, it often means there's not exactly a standardized size, but you might expect to see a 30, 40 centimeter painting for about 60, 65,000 euros, so quite modest, and that's the price point that they would be at. And then slightly larger, 50 centimeters, 80,000 euros, and so on and so forth. You know, you can of course sort of fill in the gaps, to extrapolate. You know what would make sense.

Jeppe Curth: 29:58

Thank you, nick. Her auction record, actually this May 24, was $241,000 for a 1 meter 8 centimeter and 84 centimeter work. What does this tell us about her secondary market? That the same size is around 150,000 euro in the primary market, exactly secondary market. That the same size is around 150 000 euro in the primary market exactly.

Nicholas Robinson: 30:26

Well, it tells us, obviously, that the demand for her work is now outstripping supply. Um, and you mentioned before that she was, you know, reluctant to try and paint voluminously, much more interested in focusing on that which she wanted to do. So that suggests that there are more people that want to buy them than there are works. Uh, I know that, uh, recent presentations that we've seen at uh in Basel, uh, even in um Arco in Madrid, that these, these paintings, even the modest size ones. So of course the modest size ones are understandably selling very easily because they're more digestible scale and price. But her work is consistently selling out and, you know, a combination of just, I guess a global recognition of her work, of course, coupled with the association with Ropak and obviously linked to the work that he is doing to promote and establish her reputation, means that she's, you know, she's, she's now a really a top.

Jeppe Curth: 31:35

A top artist can you say, is that good or bad?

Nicholas Robinson: 31:38

because it also makes room for what we call flipping right well, yeah, of course, that's what happens when, when there are too few works and more people that want them. But I think I mean all the works now come from, come through Ropac, so I mean a gallery of this caliber. They, they have presumably the luxury of who to sell them to, which means that they will control the market as much as they're able to do, but obviously some will come out now and then, and there there are paintings, of course, that have been out in the world that predate her working relationship with his gallery. So so things like this will be ones that come to the market and what will happen is that, you know, the prices will be either the same or in excess of the primary market prices, most likely. I mean, you know, you have to also realize that she's 84 years old and so, you know, people are aware that that that there's a finite amount of work that she's going to be able to do um henceforth.

Nicholas Robinson: 32:49

So people will take the chance to buy them while they can, um, there's every chance that they will, you know, become much more expensive, as emblematic of, you know, this incredible kind of abstraction which which never, which never goes out of style, or or at least never goes away in a market sense or in a demand sense. You know, classic work from the 40s and the 50s, colour field work from the 1960s, the kinds of artists that I've mentioned, from the 70s. Obviously there was a big return to painting in the 1980s, so we get these vagaries of taste and fashion a little bit, which you know tend to fluctuate a bit between figuration and abstraction. But fundamentally, you know, this is a kind of painting that is very universal and sufficiently established that the interest in it never really wanes completely.

Jeppe Curth: 34:00

Okay. So if we look back on Jung's extensive career, what do you believe will be her lasting legacy in this art world, and how does this influence our advice to collectors?

Nicholas Robinson: 34:13

Well, I mean I, you know any response to any. Any work is, of course, a somewhat subjective one, but I also feel like we trust the evidence of her recent recognition by the market and the changes in the volume of sales that she's made the price point that the work has achieved, the secondary market results that you've referenced. I believe that she will come to be recognized, one of these seminal artists making a very highly personal, gestural, expressive painting that, you know, that also spans figuration and abstraction, but that is really, you know, just a very distinctive, unique voice. I mean her. You know painters that came out of that sort of period, in the in the 1970s.

Nicholas Robinson: 35:09

I mean I mentioned Twombly and then, and then, of course, I've mentioned Joan Mitchell and Benglis. I mean other painters like, even like Philip Guston, people like that, people that have, you know, a by virtue of very few marks, leave no doubt as to who was responsible for making that painting. I mean Jungwirth's paintings have this visual signature in them and I think such is the potency of that mark making that I think her legacy will be one of the great painters of, you know, the last 50 years.

Jeppe Curth: 35:54

So, nick, what will the future bring?

Nicholas Robinson: 35:58

Well, unfortunately I left my crystal ball at home today, so I don't know, but I think that I think that the the future will bring increased recognition, um, and you know more and more museum exhibitions, more and more reverence and respect for you know her, her achievement. These are exquisite paintings which are so full of energy, so raw and highly emotive. And you know, when you have this combination of of elements in a painting, it's a highly sort of alchemical thing. And and you know Jungwirth, she has that, she has that. So the future will probably just bring greater recognition for that. Well, I say it's a fact, but of course it's an opinion, but it's an opinion that's shared by sufficiently great numbers of people that I think her place will be assured.

Jeppe Curth: 37:00

For those that are new to Martha Youngwood's arts, where would you recommend they begin their exploration, and how do this enhance their journey as a collector?

Nicholas Robinson: 37:12

Well, it's possible to find some really nice content about her work on the Thaddeus Ropak website. He's had not so many exhibitions but enough that you can see a few different bodies of work. You could see numerous really nice examples. And then there's all kinds of quotations, some links to written reviews and also some video interviews conducted with Youngworth herself video interviews conducted with Youngworth herself, and she is an interesting interviewee. She's very forthright, she's very opinionated, she's a little dry, um, but very kind of determined and singular and impressive, um, elegant and fierce in a really great way. So it's kind of enjoyable to get a, an impression of her from from, from that, from those Um, I would, I would do that. And, of course, if you go onto YouTube and search for her name, then you will find other videos, probably conducted in institutions, and what have you other than the ones that Ropak has has made himself?

Jeppe Curth: 38:25

institutions, and what have you other than the ones that ropak has, has made himself good? Uh, I think on my paper we covered the most of young worth. You have anything to add?

Nicholas Robinson: 38:36

no, um, go and have a look.

Jeppe Curth: 38:39

Uh, you'll be pleasantly surprised, I think, if it's not an artist that you're already familiar with if you have any questions or any requests, you are more than welcome to write to us at info at nordicartpartnerscom, and we will do what we can to help you. Thanks for listening and we hope to have you back for the next episode. Goodbye.