Art
#art history
#Ewa Juszkiewicz
#exhibition
#painting
#portraits
![an oil painting after an 18th century painting of a woman in a white dress, leaning on a cushion, with fabric and a fern frond covering her face](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/EWA-JUSZKIEWICZ-VENICE-2024_104867.jpg)
“Untitled (after Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun)” (2020), oil on canvas, 130 x 100 centimeters. All photos © the artist, courtesy of Almine Rech, shared with permission
From elaborate hairstyles to hypertrophied mushrooms, an array of sudden face coverings function in Ewa Juszkiewicz’s portraits. Drawing on genteel likenesses of ladies primarily from the 18th and nineteenth centuries, the artist superimposes cloth, bouquets of fruit, foliage, and extra, over the ladies’s faces.
In a collateral occasion through the sixtieth Annual Venice Biennale, offered by the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso and Almine Rech, Juszkiewicz presents a collection of works made between 2019 and 2024 that encapsulate her exact reconception of a preferred Western style. Locks with Leaves and Swelling Buds showcases her elaborate, technically achieved items utilizing conventional oil portray and varnishing strategies.
Juszkiewicz’s nameless topics are reminders of the systemic omission of ladies from the histories of artwork and the previous extra broadly. Actually within the face of portraits meant to memorialize and have fun people, the artist erases their identities fully, alluding solely to the unique artists’ names within the titles. In a seemingly contradictory method, by drawing our consideration to this erasure, Juszkiewicz stokes our curiosity about who they have been.
“By protecting the face of historic portraits, Juszkiewicz challenges the very essence of this style: she destroys the portrait as such,” says curator Guillermo Solana. In a latest video, we get a peek contained in the artist’s studio, the place she describes how components of one other European portray custom, the nonetheless life, proffers a wealthy nicely of symbolic objects to hide every sitter’s face, from botanicals to ribbons to meals.
Locks with Leaves and Swilling Buds continues in Venice at Palazzo Cavanis by way of September 1. Discover extra on the artist’s website and Instagram.
![an oil portrait from a historic painting featuring a woman in a yellow dress against a burgundy background with hair and textiles tied all over her face](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/EWA-JUSZKIEWICZ-VENICE-2024_104864.jpg)
“Untitled (after François Gérard)” (2023), oil on canvas, 100 x 80 centimeters
![an oil portrait from a historic painting featuring a woman in a blue and white dress against a neutral background with her blonde hair totally concealing her face](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/EWA-JUSZKIEWICZ-VENICE-2024_104859.jpg)
“Untitled (after Joseph van Lerius)” (2020), oil on canvas, 70 x 55 centimeters
![two images side by side showing oil portraits of women, on the left a woman in an orange dress with fruit and ribbons covering her face, and on the right, a silhouette of a woman with red fabric over her whole top half with a pearl dangling from the top of her head](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/juszkiewicz-2up.jpg)
Left: “Portrait in Venetian Purple (after Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun)” (2024), oil on canvas, 190 x 140 centimeters. Proper: “Woman with a Pearl (after François Gérard)” (2024), oil on canvas, 80 x 65 centimeters
![an oil painting of a female figure against a neutral background with numerous palm fronts and tropical plants totally concealing the face](https://www.thisiscolossal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/EWA-JUSZKIEWICZ-VENICE-2024_104868.jpg)
“Chook of paradise” (2023) oil on canvas, 200 x 160 centimeters. Photograph by Serge Hasenböhler Fotografie
#art history
#Ewa Juszkiewicz
#exhibition
#painting
#portraits
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