ART CITIES:N.York-Ewa Juszkiewicz
Through her paintings, Ewa Juszkiewicz challenges visual conventions and confronts stereotypical perceptions of women’s beauty in classical European painting. By deconstructing and reinterpreting the female subject in historical artworks, Juszkiewicz undermines their constant, indisputable character. One of the most celebrated contemporary Polish painters of today, Juszkiewicz challenges the viewers’ perception by experimenting with the form of the female figure and face, balancing human and inhuman elements within her work to reveal a style that is at once classical in technique, yet subversive and rebellious in content.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive
Ewa Juszkiewicz presents “In vain her feet in sparkling laces glow” at Gagosian in New York which is viewable exclusively through the storefront windows of the Gallery, 24 hours a day. Since 2011, Juszkiewicz has been making oil portraits that closely mimic historical European portraits in form and technique. Her sources date from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. However, at the crucial locus of portraiture—the face—the painting veers away from history and into the artist’s imagination, toward both the ridiculous and the sublime. In this series of new paintings, by obscuring the expressive potential of the face, Juszkiewicz suggests the schematic representation of women in history, and the absence of women’s self-expression in history told by men. In “Untitled (after Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun)” (2020), the figure is posed in a landscape with familiar neoclassical elements, but in place of the subject’s head and shoulders is a towering swathe of fabric, arranged in a pile and topped with foliage, alluding to the degree to which the woman’s identity is constructed by the elements of dress and class signifiers. Through meticulous technique and an acute sensitivity to color, Juszkiewicz engineers strangeness without compromising the aesthetic harmony of the images from which she works. Classical in method but subversive in intent, her paintings eerily deconstruct ideals of feminine beauty and other societal clichés. In remaking depictions of the wives, mothers, or daughters of privilege, but stripping away what remains of their subjective individualities, Juszkiewicz’s faceless portraits narrate a history of feminine erasure that courses through the Western art historical canon.
Born in Gdańsk, Poland, Ewa Juszkiewicz lives and works in Warsaw. She earned an MA in painting from the Akademia Sztuk Pięknych, Gdańsk, in 2009, and a PhD from the Akademia Sztuk Pięknych im. Jana Matejki, Krakow, in 2016. Juszkiewicz began her female portrait series in 2011 and continues to explore the unsettling possibilities it holds out, evoking the uncanny without compromising the aesthetic harmony of the images from which she works. Classical in method but subversive, eerie, even rebellious in content, her paintings deconstruct ideals of feminine beauty and the contexts in which they have arisen and persist. In 2015, Juszkiewicz produced a series of paintings of artworks considered missing, or lost to theft, fire, or conflict. Using archival photographs, she re-created these originals, replacing missing colors and details with her own interpretations. Selecting subjects based on their nostalgic evocation of her own losses, she entwines the shared and the secret, underscoring the commonality of memory. In paintings from 2020, she treats the female body and head in a quasi-sculptural manner, assembling precise depictions of hair, leaves, and fabric into hybrid creatures in which the worlds of nature and the senses are interlaced with storied images and symbols. Interested in contrasts, contradictions, and seemingly incompatible juxtapositions, Juszkiewicz analyzes and transforms the past—in dialogue with the modern-day—broadening our interpretation of history through change and deconstruction.
Photo: Left: Ewa Juszkiewicz, Untitled (after Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun), 2020, Oil on canvas, 160 × 120 cm, © Ewa Juszkiewicz, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian. Right: Ewa Juszkiewicz, Untitled (after Louis Leopold Boilly), 2019 Oil on canvas, 200 × 160 cm, © Ewa Juszkiewicz. Photo: Bartosz Gorka, Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
Info: Gagosian Gallery, 821 Park Avenue, New York, Duration: 17/11/2020-4/1/2021, Days & Hours: Daily 00:00-24:00 (The exhibition space is viewable through the storefront windows), https://gagosian.com
