Executed in 2013, Maria (After Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck) is a superb example from Ewa Juszkiewicz’s corpus of works investigating the role of the female sitter in contemporary portraiture. The composition of the present work directly references the seventeenth-century painter Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck's celebrated work Portrait of Maria van Strijp in the collects ion of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Establishing a dialogue with this genre throughout art history, Juszkiewicz’s painterly practice draws upon a range of sources, from early Flemish still life to eighteenth and nineteenth-century portraiture by European artists. Juszkiewicz was born in Gdańsk in 1984 and currently lives and works in Krakow. Her work was recently exhibited at Gagosian in New York (In vain her feet in sparkling laces glow, November 2020 – January 2021) and at Frieze New York in May 2021. There is an ongoing show of her recent portraiture at Almine Rech in Paris (Bloom, and Ever Springing Shade, September – October 2021). One of the most exciting young artists working today, Juszkiewicz’s painterly practice challenges conventional standards of beauty and interrogates art historical canons of picturing women.

Set against a muted background, the present painting depicts a woman wearing a dark blue dress with wide white cuffs. The anonymous subject sits upright on a red upholstered chair, her arm resting on its back in a pose that would suggest she is looking out towards the viewer. Yet the sitter’s face is obscured entirely by white silk fabric wrapped loosely around her head. Juszkiewicz’s nuanced depiction of draped fabric here is reminiscent of the Old Masters, yet her uncanny concealment of the sitter’s face upends any sense of art historical convention. 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.

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. In turn, she recontextualizes this esteemed genre, infusing her technically adroit works with uncanny compositional devices reminiscent of the Surrealists, most specifically Magritte and Dalí. On the surface of Maria (After Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck), Juszkiewicz reconfigures the tradition of nineteenth-century painting for a truly contemporary audience whilst challenging our cultural expectations of female subjects in portraiture.