Apolonia Sokol's "Fat-Ima" features a figure against a vivid brick wall backdrop, utilizing contrasting colors like dark blue and pink. The subject holds a paper, dressed in a blend of modern and traditional clothing, fostering a dynamic composition. The elongated forms in this figurative style challenge traditional portraiture, creating an open, almost abstract space. Sokol's work often examines identity and presence, highlighting social issues through dense visual narratives that intersect with historical art references and contemporary themes of feminism and queer identity. ...
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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T H E P I L L was founded in 2016 by Suela J. Cennet in the historic peninsula of Istanbul, to operate as a global platform and mobile vessel for contemporary art, supporting artists through a dynamic of cosmopolitanism beyond the dialectics of center and periphery. Initially envisioned by its founder as a space for an aesthetic of friendship, the gallery's programming is strongly inspired by the history and ideas of utopia and dystopia in modernism, with a particular focus on displacement, diaspora, feminisms, and queer aesthetics as reflected in contemporary artistic practices. ...
