Ewa Juszkiewicz: Recent Paintings

Ewa Juszkiewicz: Recent Paintings brings together more than thirty of the artist’s surreal portraits of women made between 2019 and 2024. Juszkiewicz bases her oil-on-canvas paintings on traditional European portraits of women from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, replacing their subjects’ faces with lush arrangements of flowers and fruit, excessive layers of fabric, or bizarrely coiffed hairstyles. Her subversively surreal works deconstruct ideals of beauty and narrate a history of erasure that runs through the Western canon of female portraiture.

Plate images of Juszkiewicz’s paintings are accompanied by details that showcase her meticulous technique and startling imagery as well as installation photographs of the works in exhibition contexts. Katy Hessel contributes an essay on Juszkiewicz’s feminist interrogation of traditional European culture and Lisa Small writes about her paintings in relation to histories of portraits, the still life, and women’s self-fashioning. A conversation between the artist and Jennifer Higgie discusses the development and meanings of her work.