Unusual object by Ewa Juszkiewicz
In this auction, we present to you an extraordinary item. It is a plate adorned with the artwork of Ewa Juszkiewicz. The work is a joint project of the Gagosian Gallery and the non-profit organization Coalition for Homeless, which supports individuals experiencing homelessness. The proceeds from the sale of works from this series were donated to charitable purposes. The initiative is very prestige, as evidenced by other artists who participated in the event, including: Virgil Abloh – the founder of the iconic streetwear brand Off-White, artistic director of the men's line of Louis Vuitton fashion house; Helen Frankenthaler – an American painter, representative of abstract expressionism and color field painting, awarded the National Medal of Arts; and Alex Israel – an American multimedia artist, writer, and designer from Los Angeles.
Ewa Juszkiewicz has been shining among the known and beloved for years. It's no wonder; she has managed to create a very characteristic, feminine style. Her works refer to historical portraits. Juszkiewicz humorously comments on stereotypes regarding the female gender in her works. By mimicking representations of women painted in the style of classicism (Grand Manner), popular in Western art from the 18th to the early 19th century, Ewa Juszkiewicz's style is recognizable at first glance – the painter reaches for 19th-century portraits of ladies but repaints them, introducing significant changes – the faces of the characters are obscured by a storm of hair, wrapped in draped fabric, or replaced by compositions of feathers, exotic flowers and leaves, as well as mushrooms or fragments of insects.
Juszkiewicz offers an alternative to the decorum of the era and its customs in the form of fantastic portraits without faces. She creates a new history of art from the perspective of a female artist. In the paintings exhibited at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills (all works were painted in 2023), Juszkiewicz consistently obscured the faces of the heroines of her works. To achieve this, she added tightly coiffed, intricate hairstyles, draperies, or, as in the case of the plate auctioned here, compositions composed of various flowers and leaves, and other accessories, which make her style so unique and recognizable. These surrealist elements surprise the viewer. They challenge the ways in which the identity of women has been portrayed, idealized, and marginalized for centuries. "My intention is freedom of expression, emotion, and vitality," declared the artist. "These paintings balance between the ideal and distortion, elegance and wildness, beauty and grotesque, human and inhuman." Ewa Juszkiewicz's style is recognizable at first glance – the painter reaches for 19th-century portraits of ladies but repaints them, introducing significant changes – the faces of the characters are obscured by a storm of hair, wrapped in draped fabric, or replaced by compositions of feathers, exotic flowers, and leaves, as well as mushrooms or fragments of insects.
"Surreal, strange, and grotesque" works, as the artist herself describes them, can be interpreted as a provocative feminist commentary on the role in which high-born ladies were placed in not-so-distant history, or even more broadly – as a critique of the objectification of the entire "fairer sex," which has been presented as silent, ethereal, and dull. Although Ewa Juszkiewicz has been recognized as a top artist for years, she was exceptionally prominent last year due to her collaboration with the Louis Vuitton fashion house. In addition to the Polish artist, the Artycapucines campaign in 2023 also invited the Malawian artist Billie Zangewa, the American sculptor Liza Lou, the French-Serbian artistic duo Tursic & Mille, and the Chinese artist Ziping Wang. Apart from her latest achievements, it is also worth mentioning the beginnings of her career. In 2013, the artist won the prestigious Biennale of Painting Bielska Jesień. The following year, her works were included in the album "One Hundred Painters of Tomorrow" published by Thames & Hudson. Juszkiewicz's works were featured in a compilation of the most promising artists and their works of art. Then, the Gagosian Gallery, as mentioned earlier, took over the patronage of the artist. It became famous for representing such names as Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol. It is in this gallery, in Beverly Hills, that the artist's works have been exhibited since November 3, 2023. In 2022, during an auction at the luxury Christie's house, the painting "Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly)" was auctioned for 1.56 million dollars, although it was predicted that the painting would not fetch more than 300 thousand dollars. The Sotheby's auction house called her "one of the most interesting young contemporary artists." It is worth mentioning that the plate presented at the auction was produced in a limited edition of 250 pieces, and all of them sold out quickly.