Title: Untitled (after Jan Adam Kruseman) (2020)

Original gallery poster

This poster featuring Ewa Juszkiewicz's Untitled (after Jan Adam Kruseman) (2020) was produced in 2022 in conjunction with the group exhibition Haunted Realism at Gagosian in London.

Haunted Realism focuses on how the aspirations of modernity have become 'lost futures,' perceptible only as ghostly traces of their original formulations.

The exhibition examines some of the ways artists address this condition by confronting the accelerating circulation of images in contemporary media culture and the proliferation of the 'non-places' we increasingly inhabit.

Juszkiewicz's surreal compositions reinterpret the work of Dutch portrait painters, concealing the subjects' heads and faces within elaborate swirls of colorful fabric.

Poster

Ewa Juszkiewicz is a Polish Surrealist painter. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. She is considered one of Poland’s best-known contemporary artists.

From 2004 to 2009, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. She is a member of the AAA Tanie Wizualki collective.

A defining feature of her work is its surreal portraits of women inspired by classical paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is known for concealing her subjects’ faces with a lock of hair, a bouquet of flowers, shells, or fabric.

By reinterpreting Flemish masterpieces, Juszkiewicz seeks to correct a historical failure in artistic depictions of women, who have often been reduced to nameless objects of beauty. According to art critic Lucia Longhi, Juszkiewicz “dismantles the old paradigms that conceal these women’s individuality and imagines a new role for them,” adding that “by deconstructing the original painting, she deconstructs the conventions behind it.”

In 2013, two of her portraits, Girl in Blue and Untitled (After Rogier van der Weyden), received the Grand Prix at the Bielska Jesień biennial, organized by Galeria BWA in Bielsko-Biała, Poland.

In 2014, she was included in 100 Painters of Tomorrow, published by Thames & Hudson, which surveyed promising young painters worldwide. In 2018, she appeared in the Kompas Młodej Sztuki ranking, compiled by Rzeczpospolita in collaboration with contemporary art galleries.