Ewa Juszkiewicz

Ewa Juszkiewicz was born in Gdańsk, Poland, on 3 September 1984. She earned an MA in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, where she studied from 2004 to 2009, and later a PhD from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, generally dated to 2013 (one gallery source gives 2016, a discrepancy that has not been resolved across her published biographies).

Her practice centers on reinterpreting 18th and 19th century portraits of women drawn from museum collections, most often by painting over or replacing the sitter's face with tangles of hair, ribbon, drapery, shells, or plant matter. The effect strips these historical images of the individualized gaze that once defined them, turning attention instead to the decorative and social conventions that shaped how women were painted and displayed. She has described her own practice as drawing, painting, collage, and animation, though painting remains her primary medium.

Juszkiewicz won the Grand Prix of the 41st Bielska Jesień Painting Biennial in 2013, was named a laureate of the "100 Painters of Tomorrow" survey and received the City of Gdańsk Award for Young Artists in 2014, and was named to the Kompas Młodej Sztuki (Compass of Young Art) ranking of Polish artists under 35 in 2015. In 2018 she was a finalist for the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation Award. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the National Museum in Gdańsk, the Zachęta National Gallery of Contemporary Art in Szczecin, and Galeria Bielska BWA. Published sources place her current base in Warsaw, though earlier biographies describe her living in Kraków, and one gallery bio describes her dividing time between Warsaw, New York, and Marbella. She is living and remains professionally active, with exhibitions confirmed into 2026.

Juszkiewicz's rise has tracked closely with major institutional attention: the 2013 Grand Prix at Bielska Jesień, inclusion among "100 Painters of Tomorrow" in 2014, and a 2018 finalist nod for the Vordemberge-Gildewart Foundation Award all preceded a broader international profile. The New York Times included her among a small group of Polish painters shown at Frieze New York in 2019, framing her work within a lineage of postwar and contemporary Surrealism and reading her obscured, faceless sitters as touching on feminism, dream logic, and implicit violence. Critics and curators have consistently described her project as a critical engagement with the visual conventions of historical female portraiture rather than simple homage, a reading reinforced by the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza's decision to give her a full solo survey in 2026.

Juszkiewicz's auction record is Portrait of a Lady (after Louis Leopold Boilly), a 2019 oil on canvas that sold for USD 1,560,000 at Christie's New York in May 2022, as part of a sale benefiting the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Beyond that headline sale, her secondary-market footprint remains modest, with a smaller number of works on paper and multiples trading at lower prices at Phillips and regional American auction houses. Her primary market runs through Gagosian and Almine Rech, both of which currently represent her; earlier in her career she also worked with the Warsaw gallery lokal_30.

Juszkiewicz's market is young and thin relative to the scale of her institutional recognition. Her USD 1.56 million auction record came from a single benefit sale at Christie's in 2022, and it sits well above the great majority of her other recorded auction results, so it should be read as a high point rather than a stable benchmark for her broader body of work. There is no catalogue raisonne, and most works reach the market through her galleries rather than through repeated resale, which means provenance and gallery documentation carry unusual weight for anyone evaluating a specific painting.