Although Martha Jungwirth received considerable notice early in her artistic career, cofounding the Viennese collective Wirklichkeiten (Realities) in 1968, teaching at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, from 1967 to ’77, and participating in Documenta 6 in 1977, the seventy-three-year-old painter is a lesser-known figure in the contemporary-art landscape. Over the past thirty years, Jungwirth has shown infrequently, and rarely outside her native Austria. Recently this has started to change. Nevertheless, her practice of refined gestural painting no doubt comes as a discovery for many

Abstract painting, Bridget Riley wrote in 1983, “is still relatively in its infancy. If Mondrian was the Giotto of Abstract Painting, the High Renaissance is still to come.” Riley was one of the participants in the group show “Abstrakt,” on display in two Berlin galleries and curated by Michael Haas, Nicole Hackert, and Bruno Brunnet. The exhibition offered a broad spectrum of abstract works from Europe, the earliest made by Hans Arp in 1932, the most recent by Anselm Reyle, Frank Nitsche, and Eberhard Havekost and dated this year; almost half of the thirty-eight participating artists are German.

A belt sander is likely the most important piece of equipment in Wolfgang Betke’s studio, allowing his works to develop, characteristically, through the repeated application and removal of paint. He grinds through or across swaths of paint and gestural lines, as well as around or on top of collaged elements, and frequently sands down the canvas itself—or, in several recent works, an aluminum ground—to such an extent that holes appear. Betke’s manipulations of surfaces through processes of addition and subtraction bring together strategies of gestural painting, décollage, scuffing, and