Ewa Juszkiewicz’s dialectic between creation and destruction has been present in her creative activity since 2012, when she started her cycle based on historical artworks dating from the Renaissance to the 19th century. The artist characteristically draws her inspiration from portraiture, especially the female portrait. She processes, i.e. destroys and recreates, familiar female portraits by depriving them of their obviousness and familiar order, and thus creates her own galleries of new images. Juszkiewicz builds a new narrative by transforming, fragmenting or changing the context of her selection of works. She creates a unique herstory by transforming the portraits of the wives, mothers and daughters of influential men. By depriving them of their faces she addresses the questions: What remained of them in history except for their images? Most often, the only thing which remains of the women is their faces.
Her works are in the museum collections of Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Zacheta of Contemporary Art in Szczecin, National Museum in Gdańsk and Bielska Gallery BWA, Poland.
Photo courtesy of Marcin Gierat.