World record result

520,000 euros for Jungwirth painting at Dorotheum

Jungwirth's painting - Untitled, 2015, oil on paper on canvas, 143 x 200 cm, framed - achieved top value.(Bild: © Bildrecht, Wien 2022)

World record price for a work by Martha Jungwirth: at the auction of contemporary art at Vienna's Dorotheum, an unnamed, large-format work by the 84-year-old painter fetched 520,000 euros - almost double the previous record price.

The estimated value of the painting, which was created in 2015, had originally been between 180,000 and 280,000 euros. The record-breaking painting is a large-format work measuring almost 1.5 by 2 meters and is a typical example of Jungwirth's poetic-abstract work.

On Tuesday evening, the last self-portrait by Max Oppenheimer (1885-1954) had already achieved a record value of 700,000 euros at the auction of modernist works. The estimate here had been between 160,000 and 220,000 euros. The artist, who was born in Vienna and persecuted by the National Socialists as a Jew, had to leave the painting behind in his native city when he fled abroad in 1938. The work, created around 1933, later ended up in the Historical Museum of the City of Vienna (now the Wien Museum) and was restituted to his heirs, two charitable organizations, in 2024.