Ewa Juskiewicz: 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.

About The Author

Katy Hessel is an art historian, broadcaster, and curator. She runs The Great Women Artists podcast and Instagram account and her book The Story of Art without Men was published in 2022. Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. Her latest books are The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution, and Resilience: Five Hundred Years of Women’s Self Portraits (2021) and The Other Side: A Story of Women in Art and the Spirit World (2023). 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. Lisa Small is senior curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.