Dimensions: 75 x 100 cm
Signature: on the reverse a stamp from lokal_30 gallery
Provenance
Warsaw, private collection purchased at lokal_30 gallery
Exhibited
Warsaw, Polswiss Art Auction House Gallery, Ewa Juszkiewicz - paintings from private collections, 13.06 - 11.07.2025.
Reproduced
Ewa Juszkiewicz - paintings from private collections, Polswiss Art Auction House, Warsaw 2025, pp. 41-43.
The painting "Untitled (according to Franz Werner Tamm)" belongs to a series in which Ewa Juszkiewicz takes up the subject of lost works - those lost due to war, fires or looting. In this work, the artist refers to the compositions of the German Baroque painter Franz Werner Tamm (1658-1724), court artist of Emperor Leopold I, author of numerous scenes with animals and still lifes. The starting point was the painting "A Pair of Pigeons" from around 1700, once in Polish collections, now considered lost.
Juszkiewicz does not reconstruct the original in a documentary manner. Rather, her canvas is an interpretation - an afterimage of the lost work, in which the history of the original is intertwined with reflections on memory and transience. The artist uses a classical painting technique, but subtly disrupts the order of the composition, transforming the scene into a personal vision. In this way, she finds in the past a pretext to talk about the present - about loss, the discontinuity of culture and the need to save it symbolically.
The series from which the work comes is conceptual in nature - a dialogue between reconstruction and interpretation, between destruction and creation. Unlike the main series of faceless portraits, where Juszkiewicz redefines the female image - here the artist focuses on the image itself as being: on its second life and its ability to persist despite physical annihilation. Juszkiewicz's composition is thus not only a tribute to the old master, but also a poetic story about the memory of art - that even what is lost can return in a new form.
