Gagosian presents In a Shady Valley, Near a Running Water, an exhibition of new paintings by Ewa Juszkiewicz in Beverly Hills.
Ewa Juszkiewicz at Gagosian
The gallery hosted an opening art party on November 3, 2023. However, the exhibition will remain on view through December 22, 2023.
Shady Valley, Near a Running Water is Juszkiewicz’s first solo exhibition in California. This is 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. The artist emulates 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, as well as settings of her sources. All this is done while transforming their scales and palettes and then adding details that point to the artifice of femininity’s stereotypical markers.
Ewa Juszkiewicz, The Letter (after Adélaïde Labille-Guiard) 2023 oil on canvas, 571/8 x 45 1/4 inches
Artworks at Gagosian
In the paintings exhibited in Beverly Hills (all works 2023), Juszkiewicz obscures her subjects’ faces. Hence she substitutes passages of tightly coiffed hair, swaths of fabric, as well as arrangements of flowers and foliage. 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.”
On view: November 3, 2023 – December 22, 2023.
What: Shady Valley, Near a Running Water, Ewa Juszkiewicz
Where: Gagosian, 456 North Camden, Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210
When: Running through December 22, 2023
Website: https://www.gagosian.com/
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