Apolonia Sokol’s figurative paintings introduce portraiture and autofiction into scenes inspired by canonical works from art history and contemporary issues around feminism and queer identity. Her paintings operate at the intersection of matter and memory. Pigments, binders, and surfaces operate not only as material elements but also as vehicles for recollection. Working primarily through portraiture, she draws from her immediate surroundings, yet her works exceed the role of contemporary chronicle.
Sokol’s paintings often present a 1:1 scale. They position the subject’s eyes in direct confrontation with the viewer’s gaze, evoking a repossession of their own identities and stories, conveying simultaneously a sense of boundary and its transgression, of strength through vulnerability. Positioned in open perspectives and unusually flat spaces bordering on abstraction, the figures seem to respond to the space of the painting with their extended, elongated and angled limbs. Each scene she paints, however ordinary, is charged with accumulated references: fragments of art history and the visual language of social movements. Even the abstract backgrounds carry a spectral presence, as if inhabited by ghosts.
Through her iconographic engagement with art historical canon and her choice of subjects such as childbirth, abortion, public demonstrations, and racialized and/or queer bodies, Sokol seeks to witness and affect the present while revealing the blindspots of Western painting and troubling male-centric histories of art and their omissions. Her practice responds to a time when images risk dissolution through overproduction, circulation, and disembodiment. By insisting on their materiality, Sokol restores density and vitality to images, shaping them through the chemistry of pigments. Her work gives viewers images anchored both in the physical world and in the cultural memory that is constantly at risk of erasure.
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