Dimensions: 30 x 23.5 cm
Provenance
Rome, private collection purchase from the artist
Exhibited
Warsaw, Polswiss Art Auction House Gallery, Ewa Juszkiewicz - paintings from private collections, 13.06 - 11.07.2025. Rome, Galerie Rolando Anselmi, Pearl, Eye, Worm, 18.11 - 12.12.2017.
Reproduced
Ewa Juszkiewicz - paintings from private collections, Polswiss Art Auction House, Warsaw 2025, p. 65. Marchione V., Ewa Juszkiewicz, "Inside Art," No. 115, December 2018, p. 114.
The works that have brought Ewa Juszkiewicz by far the greatest fame and international acclaim are her portraits of women in which, paradoxically, the face does not play a role. The artist reinterprets classical female representations, known from the history of painting from the Renaissance to the 19th century, and instead of reproducing the models' faces, she covers them with tangled hair, lace and even surreal structures made of shells or mycobiotes.
In the offered work, the artist reaches for a different medium this time - collage. Using an illustration torn from an old album, she intervenes on it, changing the context of the representation. The black-and-white reproduction showing a historical female portrait is transformed into Juszkiewicz's surreal vision: in place of the face appear elements of fauna cut from the photograph. This surprising procedure, although formally simple, opens the field to new interpretations. As in painting, the artist strips the portrait of its obviousness and "known order" to show an alternative - an image that does not reflect, but expresses.
The collage on display confirms the conceptual nature of Juszkiewicz's work, in which appropriation and deconstruction become tools of critique. The face - traditionally treated as the center of identity - disappears, and its place is taken by an organic mask. The work balances on the border between beauty and the grotesque, evoking associations with a cabinet of curiosities, but also opening a space for reflection on the limitations of the old canons of female portraiture. It is a kind of "miniature" of the artist's entire concept - it shows that also in the form of a collage it is possible to build new narratives that unmask the oppressive nature of traditional representations and propose a different, scheme-free iconography of femininity.
