Ewa Juszkiewicz “In vain her feet in sparkling laces glow”

Gagosian Gallery Park & 75

[Image: Ewa Juszkiewicz "Untitled (after Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun)" (2020) oil on canvas, 63 × 47 1/4 in. © Ewa Juszkiewicz]

This event has ended.

I find the boundary between beauty and ugliness very fluid.
—Ewa Juszkiewicz

Gagosian presents Ewa Juszkiewicz’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and her representation in the United States and Hong Kong. The installation will be viewable exclusively through the storefront windows of Gagosian Park & 75, New York, twenty-four hours a day.

In her portraits of women, Juszkiewicz treats the female body as modular and sculptural, turning genre conventions inside out. Beginning with images drawn from the Western canon, she adds touches of the surreal, the fantastical, and the grotesque. Her subjects, carefully posed and dressed luxuriously, are hybrid characters that mix elements of nature and culture, producing results that are at once familiar and uncanny.

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.

Ewa Juszkiewicz was born in 1984 in Gdańsk, Poland, and lives and works in Warsaw. Collections include Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, Warsaw; Muzeum Narodowe w Gdańsku, Gdańsk, Poland; Zachęta Sztuki Współczesnej w Szczecinie, Szczecin, Poland; Towarzystwo Zachęty Sztuk Pięknych w Olsztynie, Olsztyn, Poland; and Galeria Bielska BWA, Bielsko-Biała, Poland. Solo and two-person exhibitions include How It Is, Asks Agnisia, That We See a Teddy Bear in the Painting, Otwarta Pracownia, Krakow, Poland (2011); Rosamunde, the Princess of Cyprus, Centrum Kultury Katowice, Poland (2012); Things We Don’t Talk About, Bałtycka Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej, Słupsk, Poland (2013); Descent Beckons, Galeria Bielska BWA, Bielsko-Biała, Poland (2015); and Giacinto Cerone | Ewa Juszkiewicz, Cabinet, Milan, Italy (2019).
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