Martha Jungwirth and Jacqueline Mesmaeker in Salzburg – Diepresse.com

The Magnolia bloom again, in all shades of the pink, from a delicate powdery to deep meat -colored. Colors that shape the works of two artists of the same generation that are exhibited in Salzburg at Easter. Two Grandes ladies their respective expression, which could not be different and yet enables more common similarities to each other, of course in pink.

But there are also parallels between the Viennese painter Martha Jungwirth And the Belgian concept artist Jacqueline Mesmaeker. Both have been long in the shadow of their male colleagues since the 1960s, 1970s. Only in the past ten years do they have earned attention. For Mesmaeker, born eleven years before Jungwirth, in 1929, it was almost too late, although she still experienced the big retrospectives in three museums in her homeland. But the first outside the country, now seeing in the Museum of Modernity in Salzburg, could only be designed; She died at the end of 2023, almost 100 years old.

Exhibitions in Bilbao, in Shanghai and Denmark

Jungwirth, on the other hand, can enjoy her breakthrough to the fullest. He started locally with the large staff 2014 in the Kunsthalle Krems and 2018 in the Albertina. In 2021, when moving to the gallery of Thaddaeus Ropaca master in the placement of his artists, the international: Last year, Jungwirth conquered the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao with its large-format, great picturesque throws on raw wrapping paper, archaic and poetic at the same time. This year, together with her 85th birthday, two large exhibitions are taking place-with more than 100 works in the Danish Asger Jorn Museum and with the latest works in one of the largest Chinese private museums, the Long Museum in Shanghai.

In the ROPAC Salzburg Gallery, pictures from the past five years can also be seen, most of them are completely abstract, seismographies of Jungwirth’s daily feelings, or are often increasingly increasing by the current world events. A newspaper article about the life of soldiers in Ukraine of the exhibition even gave the title: « The last day is the worst. » The associations for the nervous lines and areas in various red to violet tones, sometimes decomposed by aggressive yellow or turquoise, remain free.

Only one painting has a specific title, “the whale“. Only one thing is rarely as objective as with Jungwirth, at most just in their motifs of battered animals: a person lying in the horizontal person, almost skeletizing only depicted with individual brush strokes. Not only here you have to think of old masters, for example, presenting the dead Christ. In addition to recent photos or texts from the media, references from art history always hang like memos. Memorial.

A pink ostrich spring at Frans neck

It could also find this way to Jungwirths Wall (or maybe have found it?): Fran’s neck ‘idiosyncratic Vanitas painting « Young man with a skull » from 1627. The eccentric ostrich feather, which protrudes from the hat of the boy like a bushy pink tail, was at least the awakening experience for the Belgian colleague Jacqueline Mesmaeker. Through this picture, the color pink came into the life and work of the artist, which actually came from the field of fashion and design. Until she started building her conceptual scaffolding since the 1970s.

And through this, the Fran’s neck of the neck grooves pink. If it filled inconspicuous cracks and grooves in buildings or objects with fabric in this color, as is done in Japan with a golden color to follow up jumps in the porcelain instead of merging. If you discovered a pink children’s wallpaper under the white wall color of her studio, of course, that exposed her like a palimps test. It is clear that the doors between which Alice has to choose in Wonderland when she is stuck are Pink’s drawing series. Not to mention that of the white rabbit from the same novel.

In mysterious and sometimes brittle, these two give themselves to the pink and love of the old master artists here in Salzburg. In many ways very far, they suddenly come close here. We follow the traces that they unknowingly laid each other. While the magnolia are in heavy flower outside.

« Jacqueline Mesmaeker. Secret Outlines », Museum of Modernity, Mönchsberg, until 14. 9., Tue – so, 10 am to 6pm, Thu until 8 p.m., open Easter Monday.

« Martha Jungwirth. The last day is the worst »Ropac Salzburg gallery, until May 31, Tue – Sat, 10 am to 6pm, Sunday and Monday 10 am to 2pm.