Ewa Juszkiewicz
Among the works in Ewa Juszkiewicz’s exhibition “Pukle” (Curls), one stood out as even more captivatingly surreal than the others. This painting (all works cited, Untitled, 2013) shows a stiff, white, pompous headdress drifting in a marl-like background of broad brushstrokes. The pleats of material forming the dramatic accessory look as if draped on a woman’s shoulders, but no shoulders are to be seen. Where the face should be, the headdress takes the shape of a rose. At its center, a single eye peers out from beneath the drapery—the only visible fragment of a human body. This is Juszkiewicz’s fantastical take on a portrait by the nineteenth-century Danish painter Christen Købke. In contrast to the original, painted in 1832, which depicts the artist’s sister Adolphine, Juszkiewicz’s version does not focus on the person, but on a fragment of her garment, turning it into an improbable accumulation of fabric.
This painting exemplifies Juszkiewicz’s approach to using art history. All of her paintings are based on works executed between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, but she transports them into the dreamworld of Surrealism. Even the smooth finish of the paintings suggests that, with regard to technique, the works have as much to do with the practice of such artists as René Magritte as with that of the Old Masters (and Mistresses). Fashionable accoutrements such as headdresses and coiffures have been essential to changing ideals of femininity and class across the centuries, but Juszkiewicz employs them to distort the image of perfect beauty and gentleness represented by the originals and to introduce the uncanny. The result is a fine balance between the playful and the demonic. She consciously targets a very fragile point of identification: the face. For instance, in a work inspired by a portrait by Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Juszkiewicz has painted the back of the head in place of the model’s face, executing the parting of the hair and curls gathered on the top of the head with exquisite precision. Faceless, the model seems to be lacking the organs of speech, sight, and hearing. Everything’s absorbed by the hair.
In a series of untitled photocollages, Juszkiewicz dismembers black-and-white reproductions of women’s portraits, some of them from the collections of Warsaw’s Wilanów Palace, a seventeenth-century royal residence that houses one of the first public museums established in Poland, and joined them with cutouts from vintage natural-history albums. Here, as in most of the paintings, the main targets of the artist’s manipulation are the heads, replaced, for instance, with images of insects. The head, the seat of consciousness, is also where our fears reside. Juszkiewicz unleashes the demons hidden in historical images, confronting the contemporary viewer with seductive and luminous works.