EWA JUSZKIEWICZ In a Shady Valley, Near a Running Water

Gagosian is pleased to announce In a Shady Valley, Near a Running Water, an exhibition of new paintings by Ewa Juszkiewicz in Beverly Hills. On view from November 3 through December 22, 2023, this will be Juszkiewicz’s first solo exhibition in California and her second with the gallery, following In vain her feet in sparkling laces glow in New York (2020–21).

Juszkiewicz’s oil paintings of women begin with historical portraits, appropriating their style while subverting their conventions through fantastical and discomforting pictorial interventions. Emulating representations of women painted in the Grand Manner style popular in Western art from the eighteenth through the early nineteenth century, she re-creates the poses, fashion, and settings of her sources while transforming their scales and palettes and adding details that point to the artifice of femininity’s stereotypical markers.

In the paintings exhibited in Beverly Hills (all works 2023), Juszkiewicz obscures her subjects’ faces, substituting passages of tightly coiffed hair, swaths of fabric, arrangements of flowers and foliage, and other additions that meticulously maintain the style of her sources while subsuming their recognizable features. These surreal elements estrange the viewer’s expectations and challenge the means by which women’s identities have long been obscured, idealized, and marginalized. “My intention is to free expression, emotions, and vitality,” the artist notes. “These paintings balance between ideal and distorted, elegant and wild, beautiful and grotesque, human and inhuman.”

The exhibition is titled after an eighteenth-century verse by English poet William Shenstone that Juszkiewicz alludes to again in her painting In a Shady Valley, Near a Running Water (after François Gérard). Substantially expanding the scale of Gérard’s original 1803–04 portrait of Countess Katarzyna Starzeńska posing with a lyre-guitar in a wild landscape, she represents the subject’s head as covered entirely with vibrant cloth wrappings that sprout an incongruous sprig of leaves. The cultural coding of nature as feminine and the image of the hunt as a metaphor for the male gaze are both of interest to Juszkiewicz; she incorporates elements of hunting still lifes into The Hunting (after Marie-Denise Villers) to reflect on how portraits of women often reduce their subjects to trophies, while the works’ idyllic backdrops function as signifiers of beauty and social status.

In The Summer (after Jean Baptiste François Désoria), Juszkiewicz transforms Désoria’s 1797 portrait of Constance Pipelet by enshrouding the figure’s face and adding a large, inverted straw hat topped with an abundance of fruit and lilies. This cornucopia points toward the absurdity of how women were idealized and treated as allegories. In The Letter (after Adélaïde Labille-Guiard) and The Promenade (after Joseph Wright), she extends the sitters’ dresses to cover them almost entirely, the elaborately piled and knotted headdresses pointing to the oppressive strictures of fashion.

Among the European and American paintings interpreted in In a Shady Valley, Near a Running Water are two portraits, one by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard and another by Marie-Denise Villers. Along with Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and other female artists, Labille-Guiard and Villers advocated for recognition and equal opportunity amid the cultural and political revolutions of the era in which Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Inspired by these early feminists, Juszkiewicz asserts their foundational importance to contemporary culture. Deconstructing signifiers of beauty and gender, her works disrupt stereotypes, liberating the individuality and vitality embedded within traditional representations.