Martha Jungwirth @ Stuart Shave/Modern Art

Martha Jungwirth’s painting process emerges from a combination of intuitive spontaneity and control of her aesthetic principles at the same time. This tension between the unconscious and the calculated, between gesture, form, trace and color, provides the environment for the artist not only to examine mirror images of her inner moods, but also the essential basic principles of painting. Her creative process is, in effect, one of continuous experimentation with an open outcome: Reacting to sudden impulses, Jungwirth places energetic, colorful marks on canvas or paper that then, through layering, overlapping and blurring, all at once recede, as the ambivalent act of showing and hiding sets the pictorial plane in motion. Her resolutely impulsive working method, however, always comes through.