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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.”
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Reanimating History: Ewa Juszkiewicz and Jennifer Higgie in Conversation
Writer and art historian Jennifer Higgie met with Ewa Juszkiewicz to learn more about the painter’s process, her varied inspirations, and her views on the social and emotional roles of art.
Artist to Artist: Rachel Feinstein and Ewa Juszkiewicz
On the occasion of Frieze New York 2021, the two artists discuss remixing conventions, the allure of Rococo, and the importance of research and history within their respective practices.
Ewa Juszkiewicz: In vain her feet in sparkling laces glow
The artist elaborates on the creation of her first solo exhibition in New York.
Ewa Juszkiewicz
Lisa Small, senior curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum, considers the historical precedents for Ewa Juszkiewicz’s painting practice.
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Talk and Book Signing
How Surrealism Became New Surrealism
Robert Zeller
Tuesday, December 12, 2023, 7pm
Gagosian, Beverly Hills
Join Gagosian and Phaidon for a talk by Robert Zeller inside Ewa Juszkiewicz’s exhibition In a Shady Valley, Near a Running Water at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, to celebrate the publication of New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting, Zeller’s sweeping exposition of Surrealism and its legacy in contemporary art. Demonstrating the many ways in which the art movement that began in the early twentieth century continues to be relevant today, the book presents an international selection of contemporary artists whose works reveal Surrealism’s enduring influence, including Juszkiewicz, whose painting is featured on its cover. After the talk, Zeller will sign copies of the book, which will be available for purchase.
Robert Zeller, New Surrealism: The Uncanny in Contemporary Painting (London: Phaidon, 2023)