The painting “Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly)” by Polish artist Ewa Juszkiewicz was sold for over 1.5 million dollars during one of the most prestigious auctions of works of art at Christie’s in New York. The income from the sale was donated to the POLIN Museum in Warsaw.

The work was put up for auction thanks to the American Friends of POLIN Museum, with the support of the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute in Poland and the Weil Gotshal & Manges law firm. The sale of Ewa Juszkiewicz’s painting launched a series of partnership sales of works of art at Christie’s to the POLIN Museum. Initial valuation was between $ 200,000 and $ 300,000.

The work sold at Christie’s – “Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly)” (2019) – is an example of master brush painting and sharp questioning of gender and class representations within 18th and 19th-century European painting.

“Portrait of a Lady (After Louis Leopold Boilly)” carefully analyzes the historical erasure of women using the unique and subversive technique of Juszkiewicz. The juxtaposition of classic styling with the suggestive subject of the model, whose head is completely wrapped, creates new narratives around the presentation of femininity and deconstructs the past, creating new dialogues”, says Ana Maria Celis, the head of the 21st-century auction at Christie’s.

In her work, Ewa Juszkiewicz deals mainly with female portraits. She paints works referring to modern paintings, mainly Flemish, which are distinguished by the way they represent the faces of the portrayed people. The artist distorts faces or turns them into bodies of insects, bouquets of plants, tribal masks or draped fabrics. The result is surreal, disturbing images that are loosely based on the originals.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński