Ewa Juszkiewicz: Recent Paintings

Ewa Juszkiewicz: Recent Paintings showcases the artist’s portraits of women, which turn genre conventions inside out. Classical in method but subversive in content, Juszkiewicz’s paintings deconstruct ideals of feminine beauty and the contexts in which they have arisen and persist. Ewa Juszkiewicz paints surreal oil-on-canvas portraits of women that turn genre conventions inside out. Beginning by producing a likeness of a historical European painting—her sources date from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century —Juszkiewicz expertly imitates the original’s technique and style but replaces the subject’s face with a decorative construction of her own. In some compositions, she swathes her sitter’s head in folds of fabric or lush floral arrangements; in others, she redirects an elaborately plaited hairstyle to shield the subject’s face from view. The results of this process narrate a history of erasure that runs throughout the Western canon of female portraiture.