“While looking at classic examples of portraiture from the past, I felt a kind of dissonance in the way I perceived them. On the one hand, those paintings attracted me and fascinated me because of their artistry and technique. On the other hand, I noticed that many of them present women according to a particular formula or convention. For example, in 18th- and 19th-century European painting, women were very often portrayed in a uniform way. Their poses, gestures, and facial expressions were very similar and showed no deep emotion or individuality. As a result, I developed a strong need to reference those portraits, and to establish a dialogue with them. I was driven by a desire to revitalize history, or rather to create my own story on the basis of it.”
Ewa Juszkiewicz’s practice roots itself in the classical traditions of European portraiture. Drawing on sources ranging from the Renaissance through the nineteenth-century, Juszkiewicz’s works challenge visual conventions and resist cliched perceptions of female beauty. Juszkiewicz began her female portraits in 2011 wherein she imagined a series of uncanny paintings exploring hierarchies of memory, notions of femininity and artifice. In an oeuvre of portraiture that solely depicts female sitters, almost all of Juszkiewicz’s faces are obscured by mercurial and highly tactile objects, from draped fabric and verdant flora and fauna, to tribal masks, mollusks, hair and over-sized insects. In Portrait of a Lady, executed in 2013, she reproduces a female figure rendered in the neoclassical tradition, but in place of the subject’s head is a beastly appearance, reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s portraits. As the curator Lisa Small noted that “Obliterated facial features can symbolize psychic erasure, and Juszkiewicz’s images visualize, with both the claritys and the strangeness of a dream, the regimes of fashion and comportment that have constrained women’s lives. But her project isn’t only about amplifying negotiation or limitation” (Lisa Small, ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz’, Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2020).
Louvre Museum, Paris
Image: © Bridgeman Images
Set against a muted background, the present work depicts a woman wearing a white dress and a blue shoulder scarf, leaning her arms on a pillow and looking towards the viewer, as suggested by her posture and the positioning of her head. The gaze is however obscured by the erasure of her facial expression. Juszkiewicz’s treatment, and indeed destruction, of traditional modes of portraiture also suggest a subversion of the notion of the female sitter as passive subject of the male gaze. By concealing her sitter’s face, Juszkiewicz is not only magnifying the lack of agency of the female sitter throughout the art historical canon of portraiture, but also denying the contemporary viewer any glimpse of conventional beauty or aesthetic norm. Through this conscious unmasking of the face, the viewer must turn to contextual details to piece the work together, such as the luxurious textiles, garments and hairdo, which become key signs and symbolic markers for the essence of the feminine.
Tate, London
Image: © Tate
Artwork: © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved. DACS 2022
“This might be the essence of Juszkiewicz’s artistic project: Leading the history of classic and modern painting towards a 21st Century version of the Surreal.”
As an artist Juskiewicz is highly concerned with technique. Her work can be admired through her understanding of texture, weight and the quality of matter, Juszkiewicz meticulously renders textiles and decorations adeptly mirroring classical painterly techniques. Through a process of disfiguring or hiding the facial characteristics of her subject matter, Juszkiewicz succeeds in highlighting the history of female erasure and the effacement prevalent within the Western art historical canon. She deconstructs the historical narrative and places it firmly within the surreal and often grotesque, challenging the viewer and foregrounding the way in which female identity is distorted and constructed.