The Venice Biennale – Palazzo Cavanis

Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso

Ewa Juszkiewicz

Locks with Leaves and Swelling Buds

Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

press preview: 17 April 2024 | 3 – 5pm

Preview: April 18 -19, 2024

curated by Guillermo Solana.

Preview Days:

Wednesday, April 17, | 10 – 17 pm

Thursday, April 18, | 10 – 17 pm

Friday, April 19, | 10- 18 pm

Exhibition: 20 April – 1 September 2024

Tuesday — Sunday, 10 – 18

Dorsoduro 920 30123 Venice, Italy

https://www.fabarte.org/en/news/
https://www.alminerech.com/exhibitions/9299-ewa-juszkiewicz-locks-with-leaves-and-swelling-buds

For more than a decade, Juszkiewicz has created paintings based on portraits of women by European artists, especially those from the 18th and 19th centuries, while examining “where the boundaries of the portrait were and what effects she could achieve by means of deformation and distortion”. ¹

In 2010, Juszkiewicz painted a series of masked characters in which the markedly feminine clothing contrasted with the violence suggested by the mask. The pro-faciality mask hid one face while proposing another, symbolic or fantastic, animal or supernatural. The anti-faciality mask, meanwhile, hides the first face and prevents the appearance of a second one, blocking the reproduction of faciality.

By 2013-2014, the dominance of the anti-faciality mask was consolidated in Juszkiewicz’s work. Any object capable of replacing a head or any material capable of enveloping it would be used: hypertrophied mushrooms, a bouquet of flowers, a tangle of branches and leaves, a combed or braided head of hair, a bandage made of luxurious fabrics…. When these objects and materials appear in the place of the face, the viewer looks for signs of an eye, nose, mouth, for signs of a facial outline; sometimes, but for an instant, they may think they have found them, but their reading is immediately frustrated. The anti-faciality mask actively resists our desire to decipher a face in it.

In her versions of old portraits, Juszkiewicz cultivates a traditional pictorial craft, painting in layers, with many glazes, following the brushstrokes of the original work. But her technical virtuosity would be useless were it not at the service of a transgressive project. By covering the face of historical portraits, Juszkiewicz challenges the very essence of this genre: she destroys the portrait as such. Her paintings are no longer portraits of anyone in particular, but representations of the condition of women under patriarchy. And, as she points out, at the heart of the intervened portrait she drives the stake of another genre: the still life, to which belong the fabrics, flowers, fruits, and other objects the artist uses as masks, subverting the traditional hierarchy of genres and the culture/nature dichotomy.

— Guillermo Solana, Artistic Director at Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

This exhibition is organized by FABA (Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso) and supported by Almine Rech. 

Through her painting, Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984, Gdansk, Poland) challenges visual conventions and confronts stereotypical perceptions of women’s beauty in classical European painting. By deconstructing and reinterpreting the female subject in historical artworks, Juszkiewicz undermines their constant, indisputable character. One of the most celebrated contemporary Polish painters of today, Juszkiewicz challenges the viewer’s perception by experimenting with the form of the female figure and her face, balancing human and inhuman elements within the artist’s work to reveal a style that is at once classical in technique, yet subversive and rebellious in content.

Selected as one of 100 Painters of Tomorrow in the eponymous 2014 Thames & Hudson book and included in the new edition of Vitamin P – Vitamin P3. New Perspectives in Painting published by Phaidon, and a Grand Prix laureate of the 41st Painting Biennale (Bielska Jesień) in 2013, Juszkiewicz has also been featured in exhibitions at museums and public institutions including: the Centre Pompidou-Metz; the Museo Picasso Málaga; the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Cracow; Kunsthalle Bratislava; National Museum of China, Beijing; among others. Juszkiewicz’s work resides in esteemed museum collections notably the ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna; FAMM – Femme Artistes du Musée de Mougins; National Museum in Gdańsk, Institute of Contemporary Art Miami; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw.

Juszkiewicz currently lives and works in Warsaw, Poland.

http://www.ewajuszkiewicz.com/

@ewa_juszkiewicz