MADRID.- As part of the Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection exhibition programme, the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza presents a monographic exhibition devoted to Ewa Juszkiewicz (Gdańsk, Poland, 1984), marking the artist’s first solo museum presentation. Curated by Guillermo Solana in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition brings together over twenty paintings spanning from 2013 to the present, with a particular emphasis on recent works, including a significant group of paintings created with this exhibition in mind.
For over a decade, Ewa Juszkiewicz has reinterpreted the traditions of European portrait painting, exploring how distortion and transformation can challenge familiar visual conventions. Since 2011, she has developed a distinctive series of paintings inspired by female portraiture, particularly from the 18th and 19th centuries. In these works, her most recognisable artistic device is the obscuring of her subjects’ faces with elaborate arrangements of fabric, hair, flowers, fruit or organic forms. Drawing on both the visual language of historical painting and the disruptive sensibility of Surrealism, Juszkiewicz transforms traditional portraits into complex contemporary reimaginings. Through these interventions, she questions long-established ideals of feminine beauty, social expectations and the historical construction of women’s representation.
Through a sophisticated technique and a visual language that echoes the aesthetic of her source material, Juszkiewicz combines a classical painterly approach with subversive gestures. Deeply rooted in the traditions of historical painting, her works introduce a more vibrant and saturated palette alongside a distinctly contemporary painterly treatment.
By transforming historical portraiture, Juszkiewicz expands and redefines the boundaries of the genre itself. Her works raise broader questions about what portraiture can represent today, challenging conventional understandings of identity, likeness and presence. Moving between the human and the non-human, her paintings open new possibilities for interpreting portraiture within both historical and contemporary contexts.
Within the traditions of 18th- and 19th-century European portraiture, not only clothing, pose and setting, but also the face itself often functioned as a carrier of social expectations and cultural norms. Many female portraits from this period, while visually captivating, were shaped by highly codified ideals of beauty that reflected broader structures of decorum and limitation. It is precisely this tension between beauty and constraint that lies at the core of Juszkiewicz’s practice. By obscuring the face, she shifts attention toward visual elements such as fabric, flowers and fruit, many of which draw on the visual language of still life and decorative traditions. In doing so, Juszkiewicz highlights how female subjects were often aestheticized within historical portraiture, while giving these decorative elements renewed meaning. Through these interventions, the figures in her paintings elude fixed interpretations, opening each image to multiple readings.
Ewa Juszkiewicz’s work has been exhibited at leading international museums, including the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Museo Picasso Málaga, and the National Museum of China in Beijing, among others. Her work is represented in major museum collections, including the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Albertina in Vienna, the Long Museum in Shanghai, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.
Curator: Guillermo Solana
