Ewa Juszkiewicz’s oil portraits of women turn genre conventions inside out. Beginning by producing a likeness of a historical European painting—her sources date from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century—she expertly imitates the original’s technique and style but replaces the subject’s face with a surreal or grotesque distortion. In some compositions, the Polish artist swathes her sitter’s head in folds of fabric or lush floral arrangements; in others, she redirects an elaborately plaited hairstyle to shield the woman’s face from view. The results of this process narrate a history of effacement and erasure that runs throughout the Western canon of female portraiture.
Born in Gdańsk, Poland, and now based in Warsaw, Juszkiewicz completed a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow, in 2013. She has risen to prominence over the past decade, with works held in international collections including the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Long Museum, Shanghai and the ICA Miami. Begun in 2011, her practice sprung from a close engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European portraiture during her studies, and the realization that women were frequently presented as archetypes. Often selecting little-known works, or canvases that were lost or destroyed, she deliberately obscures her sitters’ identities, replacing their heads with fungi, flowers, insects or drapery. In doing so, she seeks to provoke new associations, liberating her female protagonists from the male gaze and forcing them into bold confrontation with the viewer. They are no longer quiet, pristine specimens, but sensory, metamorphic hybrids, each alive with stories and secrets.
In 2015, Juszkiewicz produced a series of paintings of artworks considered missing, or lost to theft, fire, or conflict. Using archival photographs, she re-created these originals, replacing missing colors and details with her own interpretations. Selecting subjects based on their nostalgic evocation of her own losses, she entwines the shared and the secret, underscoring the commonality of memory. In paintings from 2020, she treats the female body and head in a quasi-sculptural manner, assembling precise depictions of hair, leaves, and fabric into hybrid creatures in which the worlds of nature and the senses are interlaced with storied images and symbols. Interested in contrasts, contradictions, and seemingly incompatible juxtapositions, Juszkiewicz analyzes and transforms the past—in dialogue with the modern-day—broadening our interpretation of history through change and deconstruction.
Practical Information
Ewa Juszkiewicz
Polish (Born 1984)
Category: Ultra Contemporary
Gallery Representation
Gagosian
ALMINE RECH
Ewa Juszkiewicz: Artist Overview | Almine Rech
Artist Website
PART I: SUMMARY
Auction Market Overview
2025 AUCTION STATISTICS
Turnover: USD 1,431,292
-51.6% vs. 2024
# Lots sold: 4
Sell-Through Rate: 100%
Highest price Achieved at Auction:
USD 1,560,000
(9 May 2022)
Auction Summary
2025 Auction Highlights
4 lots sold at auction in 2025 for a total turnover of USD 1,431,292. With no lot failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 100%. The highest price for 2025 was achieved by Untitled (after Joseph Wright), a painting dated 2020, that sold at Bonhams, in Hong-Kong, on 28 November 2025 for HKD 7,243,000 (USD 931,030). This is the only lot that sold for more than USD 500,000, representing 65% of the total turnover for 2025.
2025 Top 3 Lots
2024 Auction Highlights
6 lots sold at auction in 2024 for a total turnover of USD 2,955,794. With 1 lot failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 86%. The highest price of 2024 was achieved by Untitled (behind Anton Einsle), a painting dated 2016, that sold at Polswissart Auction, in Poland, on 11 June 2024 for PLN 3,720,000 (USD 919,535).
2024 Top 2 Lots
2 lots sold for more than USD 500,000, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 1,733,850, representing 58.7% of the total turnover for 2024.
2023 Auction Highlights
10 lots sold at auction in 2023 for a total turnover of USD 4,787,254. With one lot failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 90.9%. The highest price has been achieved at Christie’s in London on 28 February 2023 when Sisters, a painting dated 2014, sold for GBP 630,000 (USD 761,973).
2023 Top 3 Lots
6 lots sold for more than USD 500,000, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 3,942,449, representing 82.4% of the total turnover for 2023.
2022 Auction Highlights
8 lots sold at auction in 2022 for a total turnover of USD 6,005,612. With no lot failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 100%. The highest price has been achieved by Portrait of a Lady, a painting dated 2019, that sold at Christie’s in New-York for USD 1,560,000.
2022 Top 3 Lots
3 lots sold for more than USD 1 million, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 3,595,274, representing 60% of the total turnover for 2022.
2021 Auction Highlights
7 lots sold at auction in 2021 for a total turnover of USD 2,635,437. With no lot failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 100%. The highest price of USD 730,800 has been achieved by Girl in Blue, a painting dated 2013, that sold at Phillips in New-York on 17 November 2021.
2021 Top 3 Lots
2 lots sold for more than USD 500,000, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 1,330,937, representing 51% of the total turnover for 2021.
Top Lots
#1. Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly), 2019
Christie’s New-York: 9 May 2022
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
USD 1,560,000
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984) (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ
Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly), 2019
200×160 cm (78.6×63 inches)
Signed and dated twice ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2019’ (on the reverse)
#2. Straw Hat (After Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun), 2012
Christie’s Hong-Kong: 26 May 2022
Estimated: HKD 6,200,000 – 8,200,000
HKD 8,064,000 / USD 1,027,297
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984) (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ
Straw Hat (After Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun), 2012
Oil on canvas
170 x 125 cm (66.9 x 49.2 inches)
#3. Untitled (after Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun), 2019
Christie’s New-York: 18 November 2022
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 1,008,000
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984) (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Untitled (after Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun), 2019
Oil on canvas
150×115 cm (59 x 45 1/4 inches)
USD 1 million
#4. Untitled (after Joseph Wright), 2020
Bonhams Hong-Kong: 28 November 2025
Estimated: HKD 4,700,000 – 5,800,000
HKD 7,243,000 / USD 931,030
Bonhams : EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B.1984) Untitled (after Joseph Wright)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B.1984)
Untitled (after Joseph Wright), 2020
Oil on canvas
160×125 cm (63 x 49 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2020 on the reverse
#5. Untitled (behind Anton Einsle), 2016
Polswissart Auction: 11 June 2024
Estimated: PLN 2,400,000 – 2,800,000
PLN 3,100,000 (Hammer)
PLN 3,720,000 / USD 919,535
Untitled (behind Anton Einsle), 2016 | Polswiss Art Auction House
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1984)
Untitled (behind Anton Einsle), 2016
Oil on canvas
92×73 cm (36.2 x 28.7 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz / 2016’ (on the reverse)
#6. Sisters, 2014
Christie’s London: 28 February 2023
Estimated: GBP 300,000 – 500,000
GBP 630,000 / USD 733,662
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Sisters, 2014
Oil on canvas
142.3 x 116.1 cm (56 x 45 3/4 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2014 “Sisters”’ (on the reverse)
#7. Untitled (after Joseph Wright), 2018-19
Sotheby’s London: 1 March 2023
Estimated: GBP 200,000 – 300,000
GBP 609,600 / USD 733,662
Untitled (after Joseph Wright) | The Now Evening Auction | | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984)
Untitled (after Joseph Wright), 2018-19
Oil on canvas
160 x 124.7 cm (63 x 49 1/8 inches)
Signed Ewa Juszkiewicz, dated 2018/2019 and variously inscribed (on the reverse)
PART II: AUCTION RESULTS
2025 Auction Results
4 lots sold at auction in 2025 for a total turnover of USD 1,431,292. With no lot failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 100%. The highest price for 2025 was achieved by Untitled (after Joseph Wright), a painting dated 2020, that sold at Bonhams, in Hong-Kong, on 28 November 2025 for HKD 7,243,000 (USD 931,030). This is the only lot that sold for more than USD 500,000, representing 65% of the total turnover for 2025.
2025 Top 3 Lots
#1. Untitled (after Joseph Wright), 2020
Bonhams Hong-Kong: 28 November 2025
Estimated: HKD 4,700,000 – 5,800,000
HKD 7,243,000 / USD 931,030
Bonhams : EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B.1984) Untitled (after Joseph Wright)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B.1984)
Untitled (after Joseph Wright), 2020
Oil on canvas
160×125 cm (63 x 49 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2020 on the reverse
#2. Untitled (after Franz Werner Tamm), 2015
Polswissart Auction: 12 December 2025
Estimated: PLN 600,000 – 700,000
PLN 550,000 (Hammer)
PLN 660,000 / USD 181,900
Untitled (after Franz Werner Tamm), 2015 | Polswiss Art Auction House
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1984)
Untitled (after Franz Werner Tamm), 2015
oil and acrylic on canvas
75×100 cm
On the back, a stamp from the lokal_30 gallery
#3. Untitled 49, 2017
Phillips London: 18 October 2025
Estimated: GBP 80,000 – 120,000
GBP 129,000 / USD 173,465
Ewa Juszkiewicz Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ
Untitled 49, 2017
Oil on canvas
154.6 x 109.7 cm (60 7/8 x 43 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2017’ on the reverse
#4. Untitled, 2014
Christie’s London: 16 October 2025
Estimated: GBP 80,000 – 120,000
GBP 107,950 / USD 144,895
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984), Untitled | Christie’s
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Untitled, 2014
Oil on canvas
49.7 x 39.7 cm (19 5/8 x 15 5/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2014’ (on the reverse)
2024 Auction Results
6 lots sold at auction in 2024 for a total turnover of USD 2,955,794. With 1 lot failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 86%. The highest price of 2024 was achieved by Untitled (behind Anton Einsle), a painting dated 2016, that sold at Polswissart Auction, in Poland, on 11 June 2024 for PLN 3,720,000 (USD 919,535). 2 lots sold for more than USD 500,000, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 1,733,850, representing 58.7% of the total turnover for 2024.
2024 Top 2 Lots
#1. Untitled (behind Anton Einsle), 2016
Polswissart Auction: 11 June 2024
Estimated: PLN 2,400,000 – 2,800,000
PLN 3,100,000 (Hammer)
PLN 3,720,000 / USD 919,535
Untitled (behind Anton Einsle), 2016 | Polswiss Art Auction House
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1984)
Untitled (behind Anton Einsle), 2016
Oil on canvas
92×73 cm (36.2 x 28.7 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz / 2016’ (on the reverse)
#2. Our Class, 2009
Polswissart Auction: 10 December 2024
Estimated: PLN 2,200,000 – 3,200,000
PLN 2,750,000 (Hammer)
PLN 3,300,000 / USD 814,315
Nasza klasa, 2009 | Dom Aukcyjny Polswiss Art
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1984)
Our Class, 2009
acrylic and oil on canvas
200×260 cm (78.7 x 102.4 inches)
Signed and dated “Ewa / Juszkiewicz / 2009” (on the reverse)
USD 500,000
#3. Untitled (after Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun), 2015
Christie’s London: 9 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 180,000 – 250,000
GBP 378,000 / USD 479,304
Ewa Juszkiewicz (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Untitled (after Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun), 2015
Oil on canvas
100×80 cm (39 3/8 x 31 1/2 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2015’ (on the reverse and the stretcher)
#4. Maria (After Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck), 2013
Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 11 November 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,800,000 – 4,500,000
HKD 3,360,000 / USD 432,354
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (1984 – )
Maria (After Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck), 2013
Oil on canvas
130×100 cm (51 x 49 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2013 on the reverse
#5. The Virgin of the Wolf (Witchcraft of Mary), 2011
Polswissart Auction: 10 December 2024
Estimated: PLN 700,000 – 800,000
PLN 750,000 (Hammer)
PLN 900,000 / USD 222,085
Panna z wilka (Czary mary), 2011 | Dom Aukcyjny Polswiss Art
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1984)
The Virgin of the Wolf (Witchcraft of Mary), 2011
Oil on canvas
160×130 cm (63 x 51.2 inches)
Signed, dated and titled
“Ewa Juszkiewicz / 2011, The Virgin of the Wolf / Mary’s Witchcraft”
(on the reverse)
USD 100,000
#6. Appropriation, 2018
Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2024
Estimated: USD 80,000 – 120,000
USD 88,200
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984), Appropriation | Christie’s
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Appropriation, 2018
Oil on canvas
80×60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz ‘Appropriation’ 2018′ (on the reverse)
2023 Auction Results
10 lots sold at auction in 2023 for a total turnover of USD 4,787,254. With one lot failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 90.9%. The highest price has been achieved at Christie’s in London on 28 February 2023 when Sisters, a painting dated 2014, sold for GBP 630,000 (USD 761,973). 6 lots sold for more than USD 500,000, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 3,942,449, representing 82.4% of the total turnover for 2023.
2023 Top 3 Lots
#1. Sisters, 2014
Christie’s London: 28 February 2023
Estimated: GBP 300,000 – 500,000
GBP 630,000 / USD 733,662
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Sisters, 2014
Oil on canvas
142.3 x 116.1 cm (56 x 45 3/4 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2014 “Sisters”’ (on the reverse)
#2. Untitled (after Joseph Wright), 2018-19
Sotheby’s London: 1 March 2023
Estimated: GBP 200,000 – 300,000
GBP 609,600 / USD 733,662
Untitled (after Joseph Wright) | The Now Evening Auction | | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984)
Untitled (after Joseph Wright), 2018-19
Oil on canvas
160 x 124.7 cm (63 x 49 1/8 inches)
Signed Ewa Juszkiewicz, dated 2018/2019 and variously inscribed (on the reverse)
#3. Untitled (after Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller), 2019
Polswissart Auction: 24 October 2023
Estimated: PLN 1,800,000 – 2,200,000
PLN 2,300,000 (Hammer)
PLN 2,760,000 / USD 654,835
Bez tytułu (za Adolfem Ulrikiem Wertmüller), 2019 | Dom Aukcyjny Polswiss Art
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1984)
Untitled (after Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller), 2019
Oil on canvas
80×60 cm (31.5 x 23.6 inches)
Signed and dated on the reverse
#4. Untitled (after Ernst Thelott), 2019
Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
USD 635,000
Ewa Juszkiewicz – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 9 May 2023 | Phillips
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ
Untitled (after Ernst Thelott), 2019
Oil on canvas
80×60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 inches
Signed and stamped with the artist’s signature and date “Ewa Juszkiewicz Ewa Juszkiewicz 2019”
on the reverse
#5. Untitled (after Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg), 2020
Polswissart Auction: 12 December 2023
Estimated: PLN 2,000,000 – 2,500,000
PLN 2,050,000 (Hammer)
PLN 2,460,000 / USD 612,450
Bez tytułu (za Christofferem Wilhelmem Eckersbergiem), 2020 | Dom Aukcyjny Polswiss Art
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1984)
Untitled (after Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg), 2020
Oil on canvas
100×80 cm (39.4 x 31.5 inches)
Signed and dated on the reverse
#6. Hunting Scene, 2014
Polswissart Auction: 6 June 2023
Estimated: PLN 1,000,000 – 2,000,000
PLN 1,900,000 (Hammer)
PLN 2,280,000 / USD 544,530
Scena polowania, 2014 | Dom Aukcyjny Polswiss Art
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1984)
Hunting Scene, 2014
Oil and acrylic on canvas
100×75 cm (39.4 x 29.5 inches)
Signed and dated on the reverse
USD 500,000
#7. Pukle (Locks), 2012
Christie’s London: 13 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 180,000 – 250,000
GBP 352,800 / USD 428,155
Eva Juszkiewicz (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Pukle (Locks), 2012
Oil and acrylic on canvas
51 3/8 x 39 1/2 inches (130.4 x 100.2 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz “Pukle” 2012’ (on the reverse)
#8. Untitled, 2018
Sotheby’s London: 28 June 2023
Estimated: GBP 80,000 – 120,000
GBP 203,200 / USD 256,727
Untitled | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984)
Untitled, 2018
Oil on linen
50.8 x 40.4 cm (20×16 inches)
Signed twice, titled and dated 2018 on the reverse
#9. Artemisia, 2013
Christie’s London: 1 March 2023
Estimated: GBP 60,000 – 80,000
GBP 113,400 / USD 136,478
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984), Artemisia | Christie’s (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Artemisia, 2013
Oil on canvas
99.7 x 90 cm (39 1/4 x 35 3/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2013’ (on the stretcher)
#10. Untitled (After Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun), 2011
Bonhams London: 12 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 15,000 – 20,000
GBP 19,200 / USD 23,445
WORK ON PAPER
Bonhams : EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984) Untitled (After Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun) 2011
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Untitled (After Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun), 2011
Graphite on paper
60×42 cm (23 5/8 x 16 9/16 inches)
Signed and dated 2011 on the reverse
2022 Auction Results
8 lots sold at auction in 2022 for a total turnover of USD 6,005,612.
With no lot failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 100%. The highest price has been achieved by Portrait of a Lady, a painting dated 2019, that sold at Christie’s in New-York for USD 1,560,000. 3 lots sold for more than USD 1 million, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 3,595,274, representing 60% of the total turnover for 2022.
2022 Top 3 Lots
#1. Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly), 2019
Christie’s New-York: 9 May 2022
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
USD 1,560,000
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984) (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ
Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly), 2019
200×160 cm (78.6×63 inches)
Signed and dated twice ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2019’ (on the reverse)
#2. Straw Hat (After Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun), 2012
Christie’s Hong-Kong: 26 May 2022
Estimated: HKD 6,200,000 – 8,200,000
HKD 8,064,000 / USD 1,027,297
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984) (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ
Straw Hat (After Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun), 2012
Oil on canvas
170 x 125 cm (66.9 x 49.2 inches)
#3. Untitled (after Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun), 2019
Christie’s New-York: 18 November 2022
Estimated: USD 300,000 – 500,000
USD 1,008,000
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984) (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Untitled (after Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun), 2019
Oil on canvas
150×115 cm (59 x 45 1/4 inches)
#4. Where the water is clean and the grass is green, 2012
Christie’s Hong-Kong: 30 November 2022
Estimated: HKD 4,000,000 – 6,000,000
HKD 5,292,000 / USD 678,026
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984) (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Gdzie woda czysta i trawa zielona (Where the water is clean and the grass is green)
Oil on linen
170×130 cm (67 x 51 1/4 inches)
#5. Untitled, 2014
Christie’s Shanghai: 1 March 2022
Estimated: CNY 220,000 – 500,000
CNY 3,276,000 / USD 518,937
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984) (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Untitled, 2014
Oil on canvas
70×60 cm (27 1/2 x 23 5/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2014’ (on the reverse)
#6. Untitled, 2017
Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 November 2022
Estimated: HKD 3,000,000 – 4,000,000
HKD 4,032,000 / USD 516,591
Ewa Juszkiewicz – 20th Century & C… Lot 103 November 2022 | Phillips
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ
Untitled, 2017
Oil on canvas
89.9 x 74.6 cm (35 3/8 x 29 3/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2017’ on the reverse
#7. Untitled, 2018
Christie’s Hong-Kong: 27 May 2022
Estimated: HKD 300,000 – 500,000
HKD 3,906,000 / USD 497,611
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984), Untitled | Christie’s (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Untitled, 2018
Oil on canvas
80×60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2018’ (on the reverse)
#8. Portrait of a Lady, 2013
Sotheby’s London: 30 June 2022
Estimated: GBP 80,000 – 120,000
GBP 163,800 / USD 199,173
Portrait of a Lady | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984)
Portrait of a Lady, 2013
Oil on canvas
92×73 cm (36 1/4 x 28 3/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2013 on the reverse
2021 Auction Results
7 lots sold at auction in 2021 for a total turnover of USD 2,635,437.
With no lot failing to sell, the sell-through rate is 100%. The highest price of USD 730,800 has been achieved by Girl in Blue, a painting dated 2013, that sold at Phillips in New-York on 17 November 2021. 2 lots sold for more than USD 500,000, generating a cumulative turnover of USD 1,330,937, representing 51% of the total turnover for 2021.
2021 Top 3 Lots
2021 Auction Results
#1. Girl in Blue, 2013
Phillips New-York: 17 November 2021
Estimated: USD 80,000 – 120,000
USD 730,000
Ewa Juszkiewicz – 20th Century & Con… Lot 3 November 2021 | Phillips
Ewa Juszkiewicz
Girl in Blue, 2013
Oil on canvas
200×160 cm (78 3/4 x 63 inches)
Signed and dated “Ewa Juszkiewicz 2013” on the stretcher
#2. Grove, 2014
Christie’s London: 16 October 2021
Estimated: GBP 25,000 – 35,000
GBP 437,500 / USD 600,137
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984) (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Grove, 2014
Oil on canvas
100×80 cm (39 3/8 x 31 1/2 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2014’ (on the reverse)
#3. Maria (After Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck), 2013
Sotheby’s London: 14 October 2021
Estimated: GBP 30,000 – 40,000
GBP 352,800 / USD 482,824
Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984)
Maria (After Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck), 2013
Oil on canvas
130×100 cm (51 x 49 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2013 on the reverse
#4. Untitled (Bones), 2018
Sotheby’s New-York: 19 November 2021
Estimated: USD 50,000 – 70,000
USD 302,400
Untitled (Bones) | Contemporary Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1984)
Untitled (Bones), 2018
Oil on canvas
159.4 x 124.5 cm (62 3/4 x 49 inches)
Signed twice Ewa Juszkiewicz, titled and dated 2018 (on the reverse)
#5. Appropriation, 2018
Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 November 2021
Estimated: HKD 400,000 – 600,000
HKD 1,890,000 / USD 242,204
Ewa Juszkiewicz – 20th Century & Co… Lot 57 November 2021 | Phillips
Ewa Juszkiewicz
Appropriation, 2018
Oil on canvas
80×60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Eva Juszkiewicz “‘Appropriation'” 2018’ on the reverse
#6. In the Park, 2012
Sotheby’s London: 26 March 2021
Estimated: GBP 20,000 – 30,000
GBP 107,100 / USD 147,744
In the Park | Contemporary Art Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1984)
In the Park, 2012
Oil on canvas
130×100 cm (51 1/8 x 39 3/8 inches)
#7. Untitled (after Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio), 2015
Christie’s London: 2 July 2021
Estimated: GBP 25,000 – 35,000
GBP 93,750 / USD 1328
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Untitled (after Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio), 2015
Oil on canvas
116.5 x 90.5 cm (45 7/8 x 35 5/8 inches)
Signed and dated twice ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2015 Ewa Juszkiewicz 2015’ (on the reverse)
PART III: FOCUS
Portraits
Untitled (after Joseph Wright), 2020
Bonhams Hong-Kong: 28 November 2025
Estimated: HKD 4,700,000 – 5,800,000
HKD 7,243,000 / USD 931,030
Bonhams : EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B.1984) Untitled (after Joseph Wright)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B.1984)
Untitled (after Joseph Wright), 2020
Oil on canvas
160×125 cm (63 x 49 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2020 on the reverse
Classical portraiture once stood as the most esteemed and authoritative art form in Europe. From depictions of monarchs and sacred figures during the Renaissance to later portrayals of everyday individuals, these works consistently mirrored the prevailing hierarchies and visual politics of their respective eras. It is crucial to recognize that art history has largely been written through a male point of view. Celebrated male artists not only created images but also shaped enduring perceptions of gender, class, and identity. Nowhere is this more evident than in portraits of women, where the subjects often appear not as autonomous individuals, but as projections of the “male gaze”: composed, graceful, and demure, embodying the ideals prescribed by a patriarchal order.
Within this context, the present work of Polish artist Ewa Juszkiewicz assumes particular significance. Through her distinctive visual language, Juszkiewicz forges a dialogue between past and present, initiating a quiet yet radical reimagining of traditional female portraiture. By exclusively depicting women, she makes an unequivocal declaration, reclaiming and reinterpreting images once defined through the male gaze, now re-envisioned from a woman’s own perspective. Ewa Juszkiewicz’s approach is both intelligent and subversive. Using classical portraits of women as her foundation, she retains the technical precision and compositional elegance of traditional painting while overturning its ideological core. Her most distinctive gesture lies in the substitution of the sitter’s face with organic or material forms, whether rendered as lush plants, cascading hair, or folds of fabric. What appears to be a simple act of concealment becomes, in fact, a profound act of rebellion. In the conventions of portraiture, the face is the locus of identity, emotion, and recognition – the very anchor of human presence. By obscuring it, Juszkiewicz not only effaces individuality but also destabilizes the definition of “what a portrait is”. These veiled visages, both obstructive and seductive, deny the viewer’s gaze even as they invite projection, turning concealment itself into a site of revelation.
Joseph Wright (Wright of Derby) (British, Derby 1734–1797 Derby)
Portrait of a Woman, circa 1770, oil on canvas, 49 7/8 x 40 inches (126.7 x 101.6 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum, New-York
Joseph Wright (Wright of Derby) – Portrait of a Woman – The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Untitled (after Joseph Wright), reworking Joseph Wright’s Portrait of a Woman (1770), crisply manifests her conceptual project. Wright’s original shows a woman holding threads and a needle, an intimate domestic vignette rendered into an idealized emblem of feminine labor shaped by the male gaze of its time. In Juszkiewicz’s reimagining, the composition and details remain intact, yet the woman’s face is enveloped in cascading folds of fabric, while her skirt dissolves into a rippling, silken surface. The gesture preserves aesthetic continuity even as it detaches the sitter from the objectifying narratives embedded in the original, transforming a once-familiar portrait into a site of estrangement and reinterpretation.
Interestingly, Juszkiewicz employs a painterly technique that approaches the sensibility of sculpture, allowing the folds of fabric that envelop the face to merge seamlessly with the textures of the clothing. This material unity recalls the marble continuity of Michelangelo’s figures, imbuing the sitter with a sense of timelessness and permanence. With her face concealed, the traditional means of reading emotion are denied; yet this very act of erasure opens new avenues of interpretation. The woman is no longer a passive subject of observation but assumes an enigmatic autonomy – her silence becoming a site of resistance, her obscured visage a locus of mystery. Juszkiewicz’s practice does not constitute a direct rebellion against tradition, but rather a subtle act of transformation. Through gestures of obscuring and concealment, she liberates the female image from the confines of singular, predetermined identity, restoring to it a sense of openness and indeterminacy. Her figures resist definition – they could be anyone, or perhaps, for the first time, simply themselves.
Maria (After Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck), 2013
Sotheby’s Hong-Kong: 11 November 2024
Estimated: HKD 2,800,000 – 4,500,000
HKD 3,360,000 / USD 432,354
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (1984 – )
Maria (After Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck), 2013
Oil on canvas
130×100 cm (51 x 49 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2013 on the reverse
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 collection 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 Palazzo Cavanis in Venice (Locks with Leaves and Swelling Buds, April – September 2024) as one of the collateral events of the 60th Venice Biennale , organized by FABA (Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso) and supported by Almine Rech. The show comes after a period in which demand for Juszkiewicz’s work among collectors hit heady heights. The artist’s work was also featured in the inaugural showcase of TCollection and Malevich.io, (I’m Not Afraid Of Ghosts, April – September 2024), at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi in Venice, Italy. One of the most coveted young artists working today, Juszkiewicz’s painterly practice challenges conventional standards of beauty and interrogates art historical canons of picturing women.
Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck, Portrait of Maria van Strijp, 1652, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
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.
Untitled (after Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun), 2015
Christie’s London: 9 March 2024
Estimated: GBP 180,000 – 250,000
GBP 378,000 / USD 479,304
Ewa Juszkiewicz (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Untitled (after Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun), 2015
Oil on canvas
100×80 cm (39 3/8 x 31 1/2 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2015’ (on the reverse and the stretcher)
Ayoung woman, her face hidden by hair, stands before an atmospheric sky in Ewa Juszkiewicz’s deeply enigmatic Untitled (after Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun) (2015). Adorned with crimson garb and an elaborate feathered hat, the sitter seems to emerge from the chiaroscuro depths of eighteenth-century portraiture. The painting is an early example of the artist’s celebrated historical appropriations. It is based on Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun’s original Portrait of a Young Woman (circa 1797), held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and previously loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
‘While I was fascinated by the amazing artistry of portraits from that period—their aura, richness, and harmony’, Juszkiewicz has said, ‘I realized that most of them tended to represent women in a very stereotypical, highly idealized way, according to a male ideal of beauty’ (E. Juszkiewicz, quoted in ‘Reanimating History: Ewa Juszkiewicz and Jennifer Higgie in Conversation’, Gagosian Quarterly, 1 November 2023). Disrupting a traditionally rendered surface of oils and glazes with contemporary, surreal elements—elaborately swaddled veils, insects, botanical profusions, and braids of hair—Juszkiewicz frees portraiture’s women from centuries of restrictive aesthetic standards. Held in the same private collection since it was made in 2015, the present work has been prominently exhibited at venues including Galeria Bielska BWA, Bielsko-Biała, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow and the Archiginnasio of Bologna.
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Portrait of a Young Woman, ca. 1797. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. © 2024 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved. / Robert Dawson Evans Collection / Bridgeman Images
Born in Poland in 1984, Juszkiewicz studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Gdansk, and completed a PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. She first began to stage her emphatic painterly subversions to historic portraits in 2011. Drawn to the indulgently smooth surfaces of eighteenth and nineteenth-century European paintings, their technical precision and boastings of luxurious silks, lace, jewels and feathers, Juszkiewicz has sustained an interest in the veneered nature of representation throughout her career. Here, the sitter of Vigée-Le Brun’s original portrait, an unidentified Russian woman portrayed in a conventionally genteel and pleasant pose, is transformed. Her facial appearance is obfuscated and disturbed by the uncanny presence of dark hair. The strange, visceral aberration rejects the male gaze, denying the viewer any pleasure in admiring her likeness. Brushing just over her lips, the thick curls of hair weave a troubling line between desire and repulsion.
Dorothea Tanning, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, 1943. Tate Gallery, London. © DACS 2024. Digital image: © Tate.
Indeed, Juszkiewicz’s dialogic practice interrogates the unstable boundaries between subject and object, the human and monstrous. Charged with psycho-erotic drama, her canvases pay homage to the Surrealists in the early twentieth century, who through their art and writing sought to conjure the dichotomous workings of the unconscious mind, imagination and fantasy. Hair was of particular interest to the group, falling under André Breton’s famous vision of ‘convulsive beauty’. Man Ray photographed women’s hair—cut and disembodied or styled to uncanny effect—in the 1930s. Meret Oppenheim’s iconic Object (1936) comprises a found teacup, saucer and spoon lined with gazelle fur. At once banal and grotesque, hair is also art historically a signifier of female identity and social status. Curator Lisa Small noted that, for centuries, hair was an ‘important site of women’s self-fashioning’ as well as ‘the focus of male anxieties around sexuality and power’ (L. Small, ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz’, Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2020). In the present painting, Juszkiewicz transforms the boundary of the female body into an abject surface. Writhing with ambiguity, it is a site of simultaneous fascination and disquiet.
Pukle (Locks), 2012
Christie’s London: 13 October 2023
Estimated: GBP 180,000 – 250,000
GBP 352,800 / USD 428,155
Eva Juszkiewicz (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Pukle (Locks), 2012
Oil and acrylic on canvas
51 3/8 x 39 1/2 inches (130.4 x 100.2 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz “Pukle” 2012’ (on the reverse)
Painted in 2012, Pukle (Locks) stands among the very first examples of Ewa Juszkiewicz’s celebrated historical appropriations. In vivid, luxuriant detail, the artist reimagines the 1824 work Portrait of Baroness Alexandrina Simplicia Nicolai (1787-1824), née Princess Broglie by the Danish Golden Age painter Christian Albrecht Jensen. Set against a backdrop of velvety chiaroscuro, her dress and bonnet come to life in hyperreal splendour. The colour of the blue fabric is heightened and intensified; every wrinkle, crease and pattern in the lace is rendered with immaculate clarity. Her face, however, is obscured by a mass of curls, transforming her into a surreal apparition. Juszkiewicz is fascinated by the ways in which women were depicted in historical portraiture. Her practice, begun in 2011, seeks to highlight the anonymity and uniformity with which they were traditionally portrayed. By replacing their facial features with startling, elaborate disguises—from insect masks, flowers and drapery to the locks of hair seen here—she invests her subjects with new life, character and intrigue. The work was included in a number of Juszkiewicz’s early exhibitions in Poland, including at the Centrum Kultury Katowice shortly after its creation.
Untitled, 2018
Sotheby’s London: 28 June 2023
Estimated: GBP 80,000 – 120,000
GBP 203,200 / USD 256,727
Untitled | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984)
Untitled, 2018
Oil on linen
50.8 x 40.4 cm (20×16 inches)
Signed twice, titled and dated 2018 on the reverse
Investigating the role of the female sitter in contemporary portraiture, the present Untitled work from 2018 is a superb portrait from Juszkiewicz’s celebrated oeuvre. Set against a muted background, the present work depicts a woman wearing a white dress adorned by a delicate white bow, and looking towards the viewer, as suggested by her posture and the positioning of her head. The gaze is however obscured by the erasure of her face, with the back of the sitter’s head taking the central place within the composition instead. Juszkiewicz’s treatment, and indeed destruction, of traditional modes of portraiture 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. Through this conscious unmasking of the face, the viewer must turn to contextual details to piece the work together, such as the luxurious textiles, garments and hairdo, which become key signs and symbolic markers for the essence of the feminine. Juszkiewicz deconstructs the historical narrative and places it firmly within the surreal and often grotesque, challenging the viewer and foregrounding the way in which female identity is distorted and constructed.
Untitled (after Ernst Thelott), 2019
Phillips New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
USD 635,000
Ewa Juszkiewicz – 20th Century & Contempo… Lot 9 May 2023 | Phillips
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ
Untitled (after Ernst Thelott), 2019
Oil on canvas
80×60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 inches
Signed and stamped with the artist’s signature and date “Ewa Juszkiewicz Ewa Juszkiewicz 2019”
on the reverse
Ewa Juszkiewicz’s paintings engage the long history of artifice and concealment in Western portraiture. Working from traditional portraits of upper-class women, dating from the Renaissance to the 19th century, Juszkiewicz deftly reproduces the conventional settings and poses, but with a Surrealist twist: she completely covers the faces of her sitters, with drapery, florae and faunae, or, in the case of Untitled (after Ernst Thelott), 2019, the sitter’s own hair. Such concealment and (dis)identification speaks to the wider art history of female portraiture, and the ways in which beauty and conventions can hide our true selves. The present work takes its name from Ernst Thelott’s portrait of Elise Dorothea Friederike, a Swabian baroness who died in 1831, aged just 21. As in Thelott’s portrait, Juszkiewicz’s interpretation places the young Elise in a decadent satiny gown, with puff sleeves and a ruched neckline.
Ernst Thelott, Elise Dorothea Friederike, Freifrau von Schaezler, geb. Freifrau von Süsskind, c. 1829-1831.
The background behind Elise is as fantastic as her dress, depicting a sunset over distant mountains, with a small branch or bush at lower left, all dwarfed by Elise’s enormous sleeves. Juszkiewicz meticulously reproduces these details from Thelott’s portrait, expertly capturing the transparent values of Elise’s sleeves; the painted surface of Untitled (after Ernst Thelott) is as smooth and shiny as any court portrait from history. Juszkiewicz critical difference, of course, is the exchange of Elise’s frilly curls and calm, rosy-cheeked complexion for a braided up-do in reverse. One can imagine that Juszkiewicz was inspired by Elise’s topknot, but freshened up the look for the 21st century—the loosely braided hair in Untitled (after Ernst Thelott) is wonderfully contemporary, recalling the braided hairstyles of Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games that wove into 2010s fashion. More recent art historical referents, too, come to mind, like René Magritte’s work, Le viol, 1945, as the displacement of the sitter’s face immediately raises questions of identity, the uncanny, and individuality under the male gaze.
Untitled (after Joseph Wright), 2018-19
Sotheby’s London: 1 March 2023
Estimated: GBP 200,000 – 300,000
GBP 609,600
Untitled (after Joseph Wright) | The Now Evening Auction | | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984)
Untitled (after Joseph Wright), 2018-19
Oil on canvas
160 x 124.7 cm (63 x 49 1/8 inches)
Signed Ewa Juszkiewicz, dated 2018/2019 and variously inscribed (on the reverse)
Executed in 2019, Untitled (after Joseph Wright) is a superb example of Ewa Juszkiewicz’s painterly practice. Investigating the role of the female sitter in contemporary portraiture, the composition of the present work references eighteenth century English landscape, particularly Joseph Wright of Derby and his celebrated work Portrait of Dorothy Beridge, currently held in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. In 2022, Juszkiewicz’s work was exhibited at Gagosian in London (Haunted Realism, June – August, 2022), the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (Des corps, des écritures, April – August, 2022), and the ICA Miami (Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from the ICA Miami’s Collection, May – October, 2022). 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.
JOSEPH WRIGHT, PORTRAIT OF DOROTHY BERIDGE, 1777 / MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART, MINNEAPOLIS
IMAGE: © MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART/BEQUEST OF JOHN R. VAN DERLIP IN MEMORY OF ETHEL MORRISON VAN DERLIP/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Set against a muted background, Untitled (after Joseph Wright) depicts a woman wearing a vibrant red dress with a blue silk sash. The subject stands poised, her hand resting casually on a piece of fabric over the chair set in front of her. From the angle of her shoulders, her pose suggests that she is looking out to the viewer, yet in Juszkiewicz’s re-imagining of the composition, her face has been obscured by white silk which is loosely wrapped her head, leaving only a plumage of hair to emerge from the top. Juszkiewicz’s nuanced depiction of luscious drapes of fabric is reminiscent of Old Masters, yet her uncanny concealment of the sitter’s face immediately subverts such art historical reference. Juszkiewicz’s adaptation, interrogation, and ultimate subversion of traditional modes of portraiture reject the notion of the female sitter as a passive subject of the male gaze. In concealing the visages of her figures, Juszkiewicz not only magnifies the female sitter’s lack of agency throughout the art historical canon, but furthermore, she denies the contemporary viewer access to their identity, leaving them with questions unanswered. Infused with compositional devices descendant from Surrealists such as Magritte and Dalí, Juszkiewicz’s canvases recontextualize the genre of portraiture within a twenty-first century context.
Untitled, 2017
Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 November 2022
Estimated: HKD 3,000,000 – 4,000,000
HKD 4,032,000 / USD 516,591
Ewa Juszkiewicz – 20th Century & C… Lot 103 November 2022 | Phillips
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ
Untitled, 2017
Oil on canvas
89.9 x 74.6 cm (35 3/8 x 29 3/8 inches)
Signed and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2017’ on the reverse
In Untitled the Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz proposes another declination of her distinctive still life depictions, verdant growths which seem to emerge from and take over female human figures. This 2017 work, a prime example of her unique approach to portraiture, showcases a woman’s head, of which viewers can only see a portion of hair and forehead. Atop this, a swirling, tightly clumped group of plants sprouts and grows abundantly. The plant cluster’s roots expand across the scalp and are entangled with the locks of hair, as if the latter, wet and humid as soil, constitute a fertile ground for vegetation and foliage. A parallel can be drawn between Juszkiewicz’s Untitled and Gustave Courbet’s Head of a Woman with Flowers (1871) for the way in which vegetal elements gloriously arise from a woman’s head, evoking the image of rebellious, strong and courageous thoughts and ideas which grow and spread outside of these subjects’ minds.
Gustave Courbet, Head of a Woman with Flowers, 1871 / Collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
In order to execute the present work, Juszkiewicz covered a model head in leaves, to then treat it as if painting a still life. The artist created another artwork with a similar composition from the same model later acquired by MOCAK (the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland) currently housed in their permanent collection. The choice to work on a model head provocatively alludes to a time when women artists were denied access to the study of human anatomy and had to turn their attention to botanical objects. Juszkiewicz’s art practice directly challenges the way in which women figures have been conventionally depicted throughout art history as passive symbols of docile beauty, purity and perfection. By covering their faces with mysterious and at times unsettling masks—created from strands of hair, greenery, and pieces of fabric—the painter awakens one’s sense of grotesque and otherworldly imagery, encouraging viewers to explore the complexity and intricacy of female subjects beyond mere reassuring and stereotypical representations. In Untitled, the layering of plants which sits on the woman’s head combines vivid, bright green leaves with ones that are starting to wither and brown. This flawed, realistic depiction disrupts and deliberately subverts the idea of eternal youth and immaculateness assigned to women subjects in Renaissance and classical art by male artists and their male audiences.
Portrait of a Lady, 2013
Sotheby’s London: 30 June 2022
Estimated: GBP 80,000 – 120,000
GBP 163,800 / USD 199,173
Portrait of a Lady | Modern & Contemporary Day Auction | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984)
Portrait of a Lady, 2013
Oil on canvas
92×73 cm (36 1/4 x 28 3/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2013 on the reverse
Ewa Juszkiewicz’s practice roots itself in the classical traditions of European portraiture. Drawing on sources ranging from the Renaissance through the nineteenth-century, Juszkiewicz’s works challenge visual conventions and resist cliched perceptions of female beauty. Juszkiewicz began her female portraits in 2011 wherein she imagined a series of uncanny paintings exploring hierarchies of memory, notions of femininity and artifice. 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. In Portrait of a Lady, executed in 2013, she reproduces a female figure rendered in the neoclassical tradition, but in place of the subject’s head is a beastly appearance, reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s portraits. As the curator Lisa Small noted that “Obliterated facial features can symbolize psychic erasure, and Juszkiewicz’s images visualize, with both the clarity and the strangeness of a dream, the regimes of fashion and comportment that have constrained women’s lives. But her project isn’t only about amplifying negotiation or limitation” (Lisa Small, ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz’, Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2020).
Set against a muted background, the present work depicts a woman wearing a white dress and a blue shoulder scarf, leaning her arms on a pillow and looking towards the viewer, as suggested by her posture and the positioning of her head. The gaze is however obscured by the erasure of her facial expression. 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. Through this conscious unmasking of the face, the viewer must turn to contextual details to piece the work together, such as the luxurious textiles, garments and hairdo, which become key signs and symbolic markers for the essence of the feminine.
Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly), 2019
Christie’s New-York: 9 May 2022
Estimated: USD 200,000 – 300,000
USD 1,560,000
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984) (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ
Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly), 2019
200×160 cm (78.6×63 inches)
Signed and dated twice ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2019’ (on the reverse)
Known for her adept appropriations of historical portrait paintings, Ewa Juszkiewicz’s surreal alterations and biting commentary on the depiction of women have seen the artist become one of the most insightful interrogators of the art historical canon. Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly) is an exquisite example of the artist’s masterful brushwork and keen questioning of gender and class representations within the realm of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European painting. By honing in on the system of representation and using it to create something both familiar and strange, the artist is able to lay bare the assumptions one brings to images of women and how this learned classification alters our viewing and understanding of the subjects themselves. Rendered in the classic style of French Neoclassicism, Portrait of a Lady is a near-faithful reproduction of Louis-Léopold Boilly’s 1807 Madame Saint-Ange Chevrier. Boilly’s painting, which is held in the collection of the National Museum in Stockholm, and is typical of the French artist’s society portraits in the early part of the 1800s. A young woman in a bright white dress with an empire waist sits in an idyllic clearing of soft trees and distant waterfalls. Clutching a sunhat, her pale, bare arms are offset by the inclusion of a mulberry red sash and a large cloak of some heavy, velvety material in the same color. All is quiet and proper within Boilly’s composition, but Juszkiewicz takes the recognizable scene and subverts it by replacing the sitter’s head with a mass of contorted fabrics, protruding leaves, and an errant lock of hair. As if the very trappings of society had rebelled to smother the sitter, the textiles completely obscure any individuality Madame Chevrier had shown in her face as the woman is reduced to an anonymous amalgamation of her adornments.
Rendered in the classic style of French Neoclassicism, Portrait of a Lady is a near-faithful reproduction of Louis-Léopold Boilly’s 1807 Madame Saint-Ange Chevrier. Boilly’s painting, which is held in the collection of the National Museum in Stockholm, and is typical of the French artist’s society portraits in the early part of the 1800s. A young woman in a bright white dress with an empire waist sits in an idyllic clearing of soft trees and distant waterfalls. Clutching a sunhat, her pale, bare arms are offset by the inclusion of a mulberry red sash and a large cloak of some heavy, velvety material in the same color. All is quiet and proper within Boilly’s composition, but Juszkiewicz takes the recognizable scene and subverts it by replacing the sitter’s head with a mass of contorted fabrics, protruding leaves, and an errant lock of hair. As if the very trappings of society had rebelled to smother the sitter, the textiles completely obscure any individuality Madame Chevrier had shown in her face as the woman is reduced to an anonymous amalgamation of her adornments. Completed in the same meticulous manner as the original, Portrait of a Lady is a testament to Juszkiewicz’s ability to deftly mimic historical styles in an effort to problematize and reframe depictions of women.
Straw Hat (After Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun), 2012
Christie’s Hong-Kong: 26 May 2022
Estimated: HKD 6,200,000 – 8,200,000
HKD 8,064,000 / USD 1,027,297
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984) (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ
Straw Hat (After Louise Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun), 2012
Oil on canvas
170 x 125 cm (66.9 x 49.2 inches)
Painted in 2012, Straw Hat is a monumental example of Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz’s acclaimed female portraits, which have launched her career onto the global art scene. Challenging the conventional standards of appearance and behavior for women, Juszkiewicz analyses classical portraits and interrogates art historical cannons of female muses. Widely exhibited across several art institutions and galleries in Poland, Straw Hat is an early example of Juszkiewicz’s mature body of work. This series began in 2012 and draws inspiration from centuries of European painting to early-Flemish still life to contemporary fashion designers including Rei Kawakubo. In Straw Hat, Juszkiewicz presents a near exact rendering of Elizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s seminal 1782 painting Self Portrait in a Straw Hat, where the original painting is currently held in the collection of baronne Edmond de Rothschild and the artist’s copy in The National Gallery, London. Interestingly, Le Brun had modelled her own self-portrait after Rubens’ Portrait of Susanna Lunden in a defiant act of associating herself with a great artist and his female subject. Through this act of imitation and subversion of both Le Brun and Rubens, Juszkiewicz situates herself amongst a lineage of traditional European portraitists, yet also highlights the history of effacement and erasure of women that runs throughout the Western canon.
In Straw Hat, Juszkiewicz strips away the identity of the female sitter, whose face is completely concealed by her own hair. The open and defiant expression in Le Brun’s original work is replaced by Juszkiewicz’s delicate strands of golden brown brushstrokes forming a neat parting at the center. The subject is no longer the fashionable portrait painter Elizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, but an unrecognizable woman holding an empty palette created by Juszkiewicz. The central focus of this portrait becomes the woman’s hairstyle, which is fundamentally a costume for the face in the way that it embellishes, conceals and frames one’s identity. Whilst Le Brun and Rubens used the painted face as a way to express principles of decorum, Juszkiewicz undermines this and creates an alternative and freely-imagined portrayal of a new woman, story and future history.
Girl in Blue, 2013
Phillips New-York: 17 November 2021
Estimated: USD 80,000 – 120,000
USD 730,000
Ewa Juszkiewicz – 20th Century & Con… Lot 3 November 2021 | Phillips
Ewa Juszkiewicz
Girl in Blue, 2013
Oil on canvas
200×160 cm (78 3/4 x 63 inches)
Signed and dated “Ewa Juszkiewicz 2013” on the stretcher
Painted in 2013, Girl in Blue is a monumental example of Ewa Juszkiewicz’s acclaimed portraits which have catapulted her onto the global art scene. Executed the same year as the artist’s graduation from the Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow, the present work is an early example of the artist’s mature body of work that challenges traditional conventions of portraiture through erasure. Drawing on centuries of European painting for inspiration—ranging from the Renaissance and Old Masters to the 19th century—Juszkiewicz meticulously renders her portraits with exacting precision yet replaces her sitters’ heads with foreign, and often grotesque, objects, thus destabilizing the conventions of her source material. Amidst the artist’s highly acclaimed oeuvre, Girl in Blue holds a rich exhibition history, having featured in the 41st Painting Biennale, Bielsko-Biała in 2013, followed by Artists from Krakow: The Generation 1980–1990 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow from 2015 to 2016, among others.
Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck, Portrait of a Girl Dressed in Blue, 1641. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Image: Rijksmuseum, Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt, Amsterdam
Girl in Blue presents a near exact rendering of Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck’s Portrait of a Girl Dressed in Blue, 1641, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Here, Juszkiewicz disrupts her own skillful emulation by brazenly replacing the female sitter’s head with an oversized fungo. Through this subversion, she situates herself amongst a lineage of 20th and 21st century artists who have explored the history of effacement—from Magritte’s Surrealist portraits, to Francis Bacon’s fantastical popes, to Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s more recent hybrid, fractured renderings.
Juszkiewicz, however, is specifically interested in history’s portrayal of the female sitter and the ways in which past cultural imperatives persist. Girl in Blue has no identity, no age, no name. While her pose and dress indicate a certain level of affluence, her face-lessness prompts discomfort and unease. Her obliterated facial features challenge the male viewer and misogynist notions of ownership around female identity.
Maria (After Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck), 2013
Sotheby’s London: 14 October 2021
Estimated: GBP 30,000 – 40,000
GBP 352,800 / USD 482,824
Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984)
Maria (After Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck), 2013
Oil on canvas
130×100 cm (51 x 49 1/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2013 on the reverse
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 collection 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.
JOHANNES CORNELISZ VERSPRONCK, PORTRAIT OF MARIA VAN STRIJP, 1652 / RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
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.
In the Park, 2012
Sotheby’s London: 26 March 2021
Estimated: GBP 20,000 – 30,000
GBP 107,100 / USD 147,744
In the Park | Contemporary Art Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
Ewa Juszkiewicz (b. 1984)
In the Park, 2012
Oil on canvas
130×100 cm (51 1/8 x 39 3/8 inches)
Ewa Juszkiewicz’s practice roots itself in the classical traditions of European portraiture. Drawing on sources ranging from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, Juszkiewicz’s works challenge visual conventions and resist cliched perceptions of female beauty. Juszkiewicz began her female portraits in 2011 wherein she imagined a series of uncanny paintings exploring hierarchies of memory, notions of femininity and artifice. In the Park, executed in 2012, reproduces a female figure rendered in a neoclassical tradition, but in place of the subject’s head is a smudge or smear of paint which obscures the sitter’s face. Through this conscious masking of the face, the viewer must turn to contextual details to piece the work together. Luxurious textiles and a stylishly coiffed hairdo become key signs and symbolic markers for the essence of the feminine.
TITIAN, LA BELLA, CIRCA 1536, PALAZZO PITTI, FLORENCE
As an artist Juszkiewicz is highly concerned with technique. Her work can be admired through her understanding of texture, weight and the quality of matter; Juszkiewicz meticulously renders textiles and decorations adeptly mirroring classical painterly techniques. Through a process of disfiguring or hiding the facial characteristics of her subject matter, Juszkiewicz succeeds in highlighting the history of female erasure and effacement prevalent within the Western art historical canon. She deconstructs the historical narrative and places it firmly within the surreal and often grotesque, challenging the viewer and foregrounding the way in which female identity is distorted and constructed.
Other Paintings
Sisters, 2014
Christie’s London: 28 February 2023
Estimated: GBP 300,000 – 500,000
GBP 630,000 / USD 733,662
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (christies.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (B. 1984)
Sisters, 2014
Oil on canvas
56 x 45 3/4 inches (142.3 x 116.1 cm)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz 2014 “Sisters”’ (on the reverse)
The only portrait by the artist to feature a trio of subjects, Sisters (2014) is a rare example of Ewa Juszkiewicz’s historical appropriations. Shown at the National Art Gallery of China, Beijing, in 2015, it forms part of an enigmatic painterly practice dedicated to reimagining pre-existing portraits of women. The work is based on Group portrait of the three daughters of Julius Johann von Vieth und Gossenau (1773) by the Swiss court painter Anton Graff. In vivid, hyperreal detail, Juszkiewicz brings their garments and postures to life, relishing the textures of fur, chiffon and lace, and amplifying the colors of their dresses to rich tones of orange, crimson, royal blue and gold.
Their faces, however, have been erased, replaced by startling insect masks that match the opulent intricacy of their gowns. By transforming her classical subjects into surreal apparitions, Juszkiewicz prompts the viewer to reflect upon the role of women in historical portraiture. Here, the three sisters rebel against uniformity and anonymity, disrupting conventional notions of beauty and inviting new conversations with the past.
Appropriation, 2018
Phillips Hong-Kong: 30 November 2021
Estimated: HKD 400,000 – 600,000
HKD 1,890,000 / USD 242,204
Ewa Juszkiewicz – 20th Century & Co… Lot 57 November 2021 | Phillips
Ewa Juszkiewicz
Appropriation, 2018
Oil on canvas
80×60 cm (31 1/2 x 23 5/8 inches)
Signed, titled and dated ‘Eva Juszkiewicz “‘Appropriation'” 2018’ on the reverse
As a rising star in the world of contemporary art, the buzz around Polish-painter Ewa Juszkiewicz continues to grow at a catapulting rate. Following the announcement of her representation by the esteemed Gagosian gallery last year, she has since been honored with a solo exhibition at Gagosian in New York, and two sell-out solo shows at Almine Rech in London and Paris. As the first work by the artist to be offered at auction in Asia, Appropriation is an arresting image that beautifully exemplifies Juszkiewicz’s distinctive style, portraying an oil painted rendering of a marble bust of a woman partially cloaked by invasive green foliage. Encapsulating the artist’s interest in art historical depictions of the female sitter and the ways in which past cultural imperatives continue to reverberate, Juszkiewicz remixes classical portraiture to ‘disturb the harmony and façade and to bring these characters to life’.
Left: The Venus de Milo /Collection of the Louvre, Paris. Right: Bust of Aphrodite/Venus Collection of The Museum of Liverpool
Alluding to the work’s title, Appropriation draws an instant comparison to stone carved sculptures from Ancient Greece and Rome, of ideal figures, perfectly proportioned and balanced, who became symbols of both physical and moral excellence. In fact, with curling hair pinned to the sides of the subject’s symmetrical face, there is a distinct likeness between the bust in the present work and the portrayals of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty, and her Roman counterpart Venus – such as the famous Hellenistic period Venus de Milo which is now housed in the collection of the Louvre in Paris.
Untitled (Bones), 2018
Sotheby’s New-York: 19 November 2021
Estimated: USD 50,000 – 70,000
USD 302,400
Untitled (Bones) | Contemporary Day Auction | 2021 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1984)
Untitled (Bones), 2018
Oil on canvas
159.4 x 124.5 cm (62 3/4 x 49 inches)
Signed twice Ewa Juszkiewicz, titled and dated 2018 (on the reverse)
Ewa Juszkiewicz examines the treatment of the female figure throughout Western art history, breathing new life into centuries-old motifs and aesthetics. Her flawless painterly hand and instinct for luminosity and color pay tribute to the historical tradition of portraiture while also pointing to its systematic reinforcement of the strictures and limitations placed upon the female body.
In the 2018 painting Untitled (Bones), Juszkiewicz reimagines the 18th-century aristocratic portrait bust, replacing her subject’s smooth marble skin with a patterned panoply of leaves, stones, and other assorted objects from nature. Through this unexpected and unsettling transmutation of flesh into foliage, Juszkiewicz both draws attention to the historical stifling of female agency while also suggesting a link between womanhood and the limitless mystical potential of the unknown. As the title of the work suggests, an undercurrent of morbidity lies within Untitled (Bones). Dead blanched leaves and smooth stones coalesce over the figure’s face into an illusionistic skull-like form reminiscent of Surrealist portraiture, and an array of perfectly round white shells adorns her shoulder in place of a noblewoman’s elegant fur
These organic references appear throughout Juszkiewicz’s oeuvre—some of her well-dressed figures sprout vibrant tropical greenery from their necks, while others sport bulbous growths of oversized mushrooms—as an allusion to the decorative background role that women have so often played throughout history. In the present work, Juszkiewicz extends this metaphor by taking the marble bust, rather than the aristocratic full-length portrait, as her source material. Substituting marble’s art-historical connotations of cool, classicized perfection with something raw and untamed, Juszkiewicz’s figure fades into the anonymity of the natural world like a haunting memento mori, only leaving her flowing golden wig—a symbol of luxury, artifice, and societal standards of beauty—as a marker of her former existence.
Works on Paper
Phillips Hong-Kong: 14 September 2023
Estimated: HKD 45,000 – 65,000
HKD 44,450 / USD 5,679
Ewa Juszkiewicz – Satellite: Onlin… Lot 21 September 2023 | Phillips
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ
Untitled (after Jean-Antoine Watteau), 2016
Pencil on paper
16 1/4 x 11 3/8 inches (41.2 x 28.9 cm)
Untitled, 2013
Sotheby’s London: 28 April 2022
Estimated: GBP 10,000 – 15,000
GBP 63,000 / USD 79,000
Untitled | Contemporary Curated | 2022 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
EWA JUSZKIEWICZ (b. 1984)
Untitled, 2013
Acrylic and collage on paper
40×30 cm (15 3/4 x 11 3/4 inches)
Signed and dated 2013 on the reverse