Ewa Juszkiewicz

Ewa Juszkiewicz's oil portraits of women subvert genre conventions by starting with a likeness of a historical European painting — from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century. She adeptly mimics the technique and style of the original but substitutes the subject's face with a surreal or grotesque distortion.

In some works, she envelops her subject's head in fabric folds or lush floral arrangements; in others, she rearranges an intricately braided hairstyle to conceal the woman's face. These outcomes tell a story of effacement and erasure, echoing themes found in the Western tradition of female portraiture.

Biography of Ewa Juszkiewicz

Born in Gdańsk, Poland, Juszkiewicz now resides and works in Warsaw. She obtained an MA in painting from the Akademia Sztuk Pięknych in Gdańsk in 2009, followed by a PhD from the Akademia Sztuk Pięknych im. Jana Matejki in Krakow in 2016.

Starting her female portrait series in 2011, Juszkiewicz continues to delve into its unsettling possibilities, invoking the uncanny while maintaining the aesthetic harmony of the original images she references. Her approach is classical in method yet subversive, imbued with an eerie, rebellious content that deconstructs ideals of feminine beauty and the contexts in which they arise and persist. 

In 2015, Juszkiewicz created a series of paintings depicting artworks that were considered missing, lost to theft, fire, or conflict. Using archival photographs, she reconstructed these originals, filling in missing colors and details with her interpretations. Her selection of subjects was based on their nostalgic resonance with her personal losses, weaving together the shared and the secretive, emphasizing the universality of memory.

By 2020, her paintings took on a quasi-sculptural approach to the female body and head. She meticulously crafted depictions of hair, leaves, and fabric into hybrid creatures, where the realms of nature and the senses intertwine with storied images and symbols. Juszkiewicz's work is driven by an interest in contrasts, contradictions, and seemingly incompatible combinations. Through her analysis and transformation of the past, in dialogue with the contemporary, she expands our understanding of history through processes of change and deconstruction.