Upending Classic Paintings

14 Jun 2023

Q.
We love seeing new takes on old paintings. Who is an artist excelling in the field?

Ewa Juszkiewicz is a gifted artist who does incredible work here. In May of 2022, Juszkiewicz saw her striking ‘Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly)’, featured above, sell for radically more than expected at a Christie’s auction. Initially estimated to go for $200,000, Juszkiewicz’s work fetched $1.56 million.

Juszkiewicz, who was born in Gdánsk, and lives in Warsaw, is represented by the high profile Gagosian Gallery. She takes classic paintings – such as Louis Leopold Boilly’s ‘Madame Saint-Ange Chevrier’ – and reinvents them through a rebellious, modern eye.

Louis-Léopold Boilly. Madame Saint-Ange Chevrier. 1807

As The Gagosian explains: ‘Ewa Juszkiewicz’s oil portraits of women turn genre conventions inside out. Beginning by producing a likeness of a historical European painting—her sources date from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century—she expertly imitates the original’s technique and style but replaces the subject’s face with a surreal or grotesque distortion…. The results of this process narrate a history of effacement and erasure that runs throughout the Western canon of female portraiture’.

And the final word to Juszkiewicz who says: ‘I wish to tell a new tale and create my own language: ambiguous, dense, natural, and organic.’

Here’s a few more examples of Juszkiewicz’s wonderful works and the classic paintings that inspired them.