Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2017. Modern & Contemporary Art Evening & Afternoon Sale, London.
All too often, contemporary female abstract artists are categorized under a single umbrella by virtue of their shared identity, rather than for what makes their work distinct. But not today. Below are seven works by trailblazing painters with varied, complex, and fiercely independent approaches, all on offer in our upcoming Modern & Contemporary Art Evening & Afternoon Sale in London.
Martha Jungwirth’s visual diary
Martha Jungwirth, Untitled, 2017. Modern & Contemporary Art Evening & Afternoon Sale, London.
A foundational force in abstraction since the 1960s, when she stood as the sole female member of the Austrian avant-garde group Wirklichkeiten (Realities), Martha Jungwirth has spent decades defying predictable categories. Her practice is personal, spontaneous, and raw, capturing what she calls the "oscillation" between physical movement and the interior mind. "My art is like a diary, seismographic," Jungwirth has noted. "When I’m euphoric, when I’m sad, when I’m angry, that’s when I’m at my best, painting."
This monumental 2017 work epitomizes Jungwirth’s rhythmic abstraction by superimposing elegant, translucent washes of pink and violet paint over a support of paint-flecked brown paper recycled from her studio floor, creating a textural tension with the unprimed canvas beneath. While the art world has recently rushed to catch up with her — marked by a wave of global retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, and Shanghai’s Long Museum — Jungwirth’s brilliance lies in the fact that her visual language remains entirely her own.
Tracey Emin and the strength of fragility
Tracey Emin, I hated you - I hated you- I hated you, 2019. Modern & Contemporary Art Evening & Afternoon Sale, London.
I hated you - I hated you - I hated you served as a centerpiece for Tracey Emin’s landmark 2019 exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay — her first solo show at a major French institution. Titled The Fear of Loving, the exhibition brilliantly juxtaposed Emin’s raw aesthetic against historic 19th-century reclining nudes by Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin.
The painting takes on even greater resonance today alongside her major retrospective at the Tate Modern, which comprehensively surveys her life through her work, demonstrating just how inseparable the two are. In the present painting, by rendering her own nude body as a repository for trauma, Emin illustrates how physical form harbors memories of distress, angst, and turmoil. And in doing so, she dismantles the historical paradigm of the female nude — rather than offering her body as an object for the viewer’s gaze, Emin reclaims it as a site of radical self-examination, exposed with all the profound vulnerability we see in the artist’s very best works.
Katharina Grosse: Color’s gut feeling
Katharina Grosse, O.T., 2013. Modern & Contemporary Art Evening & Afternoon Sale, London.
While Tracey Emin uses the canvas to represent the human form, Katharina Grosse bypasses representation to directly impact the viewer’s body. As Grosse has explained, “I am searching for a painted picture that has bodily contact, that addresses the entire bodily intelligence and can resonate in every fibre of our being.” In O.T., sweeping arcs of acid yellows, deep violets, and fluorescent reds surge across the surface in overlapping bands, cut through by jagged passages of orange and green. The result is an extraordinary sense of depth that belies the flatness of the canvas.
Celebrated for monumental site installations that consume entire environments, Grosse brings that same infinite scale to this work. It can read as a fragment of something much larger, but rather than feeling incomplete, its visceral impact leaves us with an undeniable desire to go deeper within it.
Yayoi Kusama: Infinite resonance
Yayoi Kusama, INFINITY-NETS (MAE), 2019. Modern & Contemporary Art Evening & Afternoon Sale, London.
Any history of post-war abstraction remains incomplete without a close examination of Yayoi Kusama’s legendary Infinity Nets series. Forming a bridge between the gestural energy of Abstract Expressionism and the restraint of Minimalism, these works showcase the artist's pioneering inventiveness — and absolute obsessiveness — as an outsider within the global avant-garde. Kusama detailed this all-consuming process in her autobiography, recalling, “I would cover a canvas with nets, then continue painting them on the table, on the floor, and finally on my own body. As I repeated this process over and over again, the nets began to expand to infinity. I forgot about myself as they enveloped me.”
This 2019 work is an exceptional example of how Kusama’s Infinity Nets paintings have evolved. At once organic and otherworldly, an intricate lattice of miniature loops seems to pulse and resonate across the canvas. What appears somewhat uniform from afar multiplies in complexity upon approach, entirely obliterating any fixed focal point. Perhaps born from her personal experiences with hallucinations, this obsessive repetition represents a hypnotic attempt to process a universe where the boundaries of the self dissolve entirely.
Emily Kam Kngwarray’s coded spirit
Emily Kam Kngwarray, My Country, 1995. Modern & Contemporary Art Evening & Afternoon Sale, London.
Although she did not begin painting until she was already in her late seventies, Emily Kam Kngwarray’s remarkable output demonstrates a fearless self-determination that would make the Aboriginal Australian artist a representative of the Western Desert movement and Indigenous art worldwide. My Country (1995) is a standout work from her mid-1990s shift away from the more recognizable elements of the movement, in which Kngwarray reinterpreted her own topographical language with washes of color that maneuver across loosely relational spaces.
The work is not abstraction in the Euro-American sense, rather it is awelye, a bodily and ceremonial knowledge of the Aboriginal notion of Country, something encoded rather than representative, and a spiritual expression of the ways in which women form the bonds that make up communities. It is a deeply rhythmic painting in that same sense — colorful channels move like dance patterns, and the dense interplay of each cascade internalizes Kngwarray’s landscapes, suggesting a place that is fully embraced and deeply inhabited, not simply observed or lyrically decorative. In a testament to her work’s growing cultural resonance, the Tate Modern recently staged the first European solo exhibition of her works in collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia.
Jadé Fadojutimi’s uncompromising vision
Jadé Fadojutimi, O! The Climate Has A Temper Today, 2024. Modern & Contemporary Art Evening & Afternoon Sale, London.
At a moment when more gestural figuration and feed-friendly visuals dominate the abstract space, Jadé Fadojutimi doubles down on pure painterly language and maintains that the canvas holds psychological weight where risk and conflict converge. The title of this work is characteristically theatrical, operatic even, but the painting’s scale and command earn it: skeins of pigment collide and swerve over one another, forming something that visually reads as meteorological and deeply personal, as though both emotion and actual weather have become indistinguishable in the mix-up. Fadojutimi treats each mark as a form of script in an almost linguistic manner, which only adds to the work’s communicative pull, as seen here with overlays of blue that sit above the fray like unformed letters.
Julie Mehretu: Weightless space
Julie Mehretu, Not Quite Armageddon, 1997. Modern & Contemporary Art Evening & Afternoon Sale, London.
Julie Mehretu executed Not Quite Armageddon in 1997, before the large-scale architectural works that came to define her practice, and the work is revelatory precisely for what it unveils of her method-to-come in miniature. Even at this early stage, Mehretu refused the period’s dominant ironic detachment and appropriative quietism. Instead, she was already building a cartographic logic that would grow into her signature style: transparent, infrastructure-like marks that invoke the speed and underlying intensity of a world in constant, continuous change.
The size of the present work is also instructive, because it brings forth a quality that her monumental pieces can obscure, namely, the tension that can arise in compressed forms as they interact and generate relationships in suspended space. As Christine Y. Kim notes, “To behold a painting by Julie Mehretu is to hover in an orbit where ruins of past civilizations meet the harmonics of geologic time; where technology is biological; where improvisation is radical; where gesture is sonic; and where the past is archaeology upon archaeology, compressed.” Reflecting this lifelong exploration of compression and artistic evolution, the landmark exhibition Ensemble at Palazzo Grassi — the artist's largest European exhibition to date — presented twenty-five years of Mehretu’s practice in a non-chronological palimpsest that illuminates both its origins and its constant renewal.
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