Ewa Juszkiewicz was gazing at a portrait of Katarzyna Starzenska, a prominent Polish noblewoman from 1804. Ms. Juszkiewicz remarked, “She had many love affairs. She was quite the party-goer. She was essentially an influencer.” According to Ms. Juszkiewicz, other women were eager to emulate Starzenska’s fashion sense.
The painting, created by François Gérard, featured Starzenska donning a black velvet dress with a red cashmere shawl. Previously exhibited at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, this artwork became the subject of Ms. Juszkiewicz’s study before she painted her own interpretation of it. However, her version, titled “In a Shady Valley, Near a Running Water (after François Gérard),” is much larger than the original. In this rendition, Starzenska’s head is entirely wrapped in white, black, and red fabrics, with a sprig of leaves protruding from the top.
This piece is just one of nine new oil paintings by Ms. Juszkiewicz that will be featured in a solo exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, California, opening on November 3rd. Most of her paintings are recreations of specific portraits of women from the 18th and 19th centuries.
While Ms. Juszkiewicz remains faithful in reproducing various aspects of the older paintings, such as the subjects’ attire, she purposely obscures the faces of the women in her portraits. Some are concealed by swaths of fabric, while others are covered by plants or imaginative hairstyles inspired by the elaborate styles worn during the eras in which her source material originated.
The paintings that Ms. Juszkiewicz is showcasing at Gagosian are part of a series of portraits she has been creating. Some, like “Ginger Locks,” which portrays a woman with a copper-colored hairdo resembling a Gordian knot, are not based on specific paintings.
In October, Louis Vuitton began selling a $10,500 bag featuring a print of “Ginger Locks.” The original painting was acquired by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami. However, the terms of Ms. Juszkiewicz’s contract with Louis Vuitton remain undisclosed.
Ms. Juszkiewicz’s approach aims to emphasize what she refers to as “the absurdity” of portraying women in historical art, particularly how female subjects were often depicted with similar features like demure eyes, rosy cheeks, flawless complexions, and impeccable hairstyles. She views these features as a sort of “mask” that strips away individuality and enforces uniformity in period portraits. By covering her subjects’ heads with textiles, hair, or even unconventional elements like fungi, fruit, or bugs, she prompts viewers to see women as individuals beyond their appearance.
Derek Blasberg, the executive editor of Gagosian Quarterly magazine, described Ms. Juszkiewicz’s paintings as “saturated in style.” Some notable collectors of her work include Giancarlo Giametti, a founder of Valentino.
Blasberg also compared her portraits to other stylized reinterpretations of history, such as Sofia Coppola’s film “Marie Antoinette” and the Netflix series “Bridgerton.” He believes they celebrate and critique both the era and the fashion of that time.
Ms. Juszkiewicz approaches her work by studying fashion across different time periods. She sometimes incorporates contemporary clothing and accessories into her paintings, such as a pair of secondhand gold-tone hoop earrings.
In her Warsaw studio, Ms. Juszkiewicz references materials like a 100-year-old copy of “The History of French Women’s Costume: Fashions of the Middle Ages,” the catalog from the Brooklyn Museum’s “Killer Heels: The Art of the High-Heeled Shoe” exhibit in 2014, as well as books on Frida Kahlo, Annie Leibovitz, and Cindy Sherman.
She also keeps an eye on the runway, paying attention to details like fabrics, textures, and silhouettes. Recent standout designs include a pink dress with a flowing red ribbon from Simone Rocha’s Spring 2024 collection and the inverted tulle gowns from Viktor & Rolf’s January couture show.
Ms. Juszkiewicz draws inspiration from designers like Alexander McQueen, Iris van Herpen, and Rei Kawakubo, who have a talent for deconstructing classics. She mentioned that two of Rei Kawakubo’s dresses from a recent Comme des Garçons collection featured fabric printed with period portraits of women and girls, including Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck’s painting “Portrait of a Girl Dressed in Blue.” This painting served as the basis for Ms. Juszkiewicz’s 2013 artwork “Girl in Blue,” where she concealed the young subject’s face with a cluster of grayish mushrooms.
As a young girl, Ms. Juszkiewicz always knew she would become a painter. Born in Gdansk, Poland, she holds a master’s degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk and a Ph.D. in painting from the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. During her doctoral studies, she became captivated by the career of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, an influential French portrait artist in the 1700s and 1800s, who served as the official court painter for Marie Antoinette.
As a female artist in a predominantly male-dominated field, Vigée Le Brun stood out, according to Ms. Juszkiewicz. She admired how Vigée Le Brun’s portraits, mostly featuring women, showcased the subjects’ personalities through their facial expressions, clothing, and accessories.
Inspired by Vigée Le Brun’s self-portrait, which depicted the artist holding paintbrushes and a palette with scattered paints, Ms. Juszkiewicz embarked on her own series of paintings based on previous works. Her first piece, created in 2012, titled “Straw Hat (after Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun),” featured Vigée Le Brun with her face replaced by two sections of hair divided by a scar-like part. This painting sold at auction for approximately $1 million last year.
Ms. Juszkiewicz has since produced around 70 paintings for this ongoing series. One of her artworks from the series, “Untitled (after Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun),” was chosen by author Regan Penaluna for the cover of her book “How to Think Like a Woman,” which explores female philosophers. The portrait showcases a woman enveloped in luxurious fabric. She wears a white dress with a blue bow at the waist and is seated on a plush sofa with an open book.
According to Penaluna, she selected Ms. Juszkiewicz’s painting because she believed the philosophers featured in her book would appreciate the enigmatic nature of the portraits. She described that mystery as the question of “What is a woman when she is no longer presented to us as an object of beauty?”