YOU BETTER PAINT ME
THE PILL® is proud to announce Apolonia Sokol's second solo show "YOU BETTER PAINT ME"
"Apolonia Sokol, or the art of reshuffling the cards..."
Didier Semin, Art Historian
The people that Apolonia Sokol paints – often other artists, most of them close to her, sometimes on the contrary of the figures she wishes to confront, in any case individuals with whom she still maintains a form of direct relationship – fix almost irrevocably the spectator of the painting. They watch us lay eyes on them, but not only: it is also Apolonia Sokol who represents herself thus in hollow, looked at whilst painting them. She does not abstract herself, quite the contrary, from the play of power that the gaze is, according to a classic tradition in painting especially in the genre of portraiture.
[...] Victorine Grataloup, curator, researcher & co-founder of Qalqalah
Apolonia Sokol does not take images lightly, she knows the weight with which the three great monotheisms and their sacred texts have weighed them down. The Bible, the oldest, is not tender on the subject: twenty-three thousand men, we read in Exodus, were put to death for having allowed themselves to sacrifice to the golden calf.
...
The divine tax on figure worship was high, and the injunction was clear: "You shall not make a graven image, nor any figure of all that is in heaven above, and on earth below, nor of all that in the waters under the earth” (Exodus, chapter XX, verse 4).
Many emblematic poses listed in treatises for the use of artists, many gestures that it is up to us today to decipher in the paintings of yesteryear, come to us, as we know, from the theater, street processions, popular culture — the sign language used, for example, by workers at the port of Naples to make themselves understood by the thousands of sailors of different origins who paraded there each month. It is a class artifice that has drawn a boundary between scholarly iconography and popular iconography, between the major arts and the minor arts.
[...] Didier Semin, Art historian
ABOUT THE SHOW
Apolonia Sokol knows all the registers, despises none and mixes them with impressive erudition and remarkable inventiveness: she offers us, in painting, a universe where majesty is an attribute of the excluded, where Jacks fight back, where the Queens always prevail over the Kings, because Jokers with a fluid and impertinent identity, alternately sad or happy but always agile, come to disturb the game.
You Better Paint Me, Exhibition view, 2022
To put it in a nutshell, she tries less to change the world than to reshuffle the cards which are its reduced model : anyone who, like her, recognizes the power of images at its fair value will understand that her gesture, turned towards the future but in no way forgetful of the past, is even more singular than it seems.
[...] Didier Semin, Art historian
You Better Paint Me, Exhibition view, 2022
ABOUT THE FIGURES
Apolonia Sokol paints those who have not been, or merely, represented in the history of Western painting. She paints scenes of childbirth, and others relating to abortion. She paints racialized and/or queer bodies.
You Better Paint Me, Exhibition view, 2022
She departs from her own experience of the shortcomings of the history of painting, of all the iconographies that have been lacking to her and that she undertakes to contribute to bringing into existence. In doing so, she never paints generic bodies but people whose first names are indicated by the titles of the paintings, and who often take an active part in their own representation.
[...] Victorine Grataloup, curator, researcher & co-founder of Qalqalah
Apolonia Sokol, Oksana Shachko, 2022, Oil on linen, 92 x 65 cm
Portrait of Inès Di Folco a painter and a childhood friend of the artist. She had a baby, Nino, when she was 20 years old and Sokol was fascinated by the tale of a child having a child.
Apolonia Sokol, Ines & Nino, 2022, Oil on linen, 92 x 65 cm
Portrait of a good friend of the artist, famous Turkish poet and painter Lale Müldür whom Sokol met randomly in the streets of Paris. Here, Müldür is represented by her beloved doll which she had lost. Sokol surprises her friend by portraying her with a dear object that she no longer has.
Apolonia Sokol, Lale Müldür, 2022 Oil on linen 92 x 65 cm
Portrait of a beloved friend of the artist whom she met by chance on the streets of Paris. The portrait is inspired by a photograph of Kaan with a crow sitting on his head. Furthermore, in western cultures a crow symbolizes receiving bad news and in French, the term “receiving a crow” means receiving an anonymous threat. Drops of blood and the pointy edges of his curls refer to a Crown of thorns.
Apolonia Sokol, Kaan Karacehennem, 2022, Oil on linen, 92 x 65 cm
The Mystery of "Lapis lazuli"
In 2019, a story illuminating the forgotten history of female scribes took place as the body of a nun who lived around 997 to 1162, was found buried at a women’s monastery in Dalheim, Germany. A rare blue pigment, ultramarine, was discovered in her fossilized plaque. It was a pigment that a millennium ago could only have come from lapis lazuli originating in a single region of Afghanistan and was once worth its weight in gold.
Lapis lazuli was mainly used to give the Virgin Mary’s robes their striking color in centuries of artwork and it was forbidden to use the color in decoration. Nun’s teeth being covered in this color meant that she could only have been a scribe or painter of medieval manuscripts.
Apolonia Sokol, Lúlú Nuti, 2022, Oil on linen, 92 x 65 cm
Lulu Nuti is an Italian sculptor friend of Apolonia Sokol who portrayed Nuti’s hands in blue after a photograph of the sculptor taken on the day of her father’s death when she decided to paint a memorial for him in ultramarine blue. Also, Sokol calls attention to the history of ultramarine originating from the gemstone lapis lazuli by applying it to Nuti’s hands.
You Better Paint Me, Exhibition view, 2022
THE FIGURE OF THE "DEFENDER"
Marked by the bombings in Palestine in 2021, Sokol depicts a keffiyeh in reference to destroyed houses, indicating erasure and dilapidation. Sokol herself underlines that this painting makes her think of the work of Mona Hatoum.
Apolonia Sokol, Palestine, 2021 Oil on linen 78.5 x 65 cm
Inspired by a photograph that Sokol took during a march for Adama Traoré, a black French man who died in custody after being restrained and apprehended by police whose death triggered riots and protests against police brutality in France.
Apolonia Sokol, Si vous n'aimez pas les "étrangers", 2022, Oil on linen, 45 x 55 cm
Portrait of the friend of the artist Bahia. Inspired by a photograph of her shot during a march against police violence carrying a pack of milk in case tear gas is applied by the authorities. Sokol refers to it as the only weapon you can bring to a march to protect yourself – to protect the eyes.
Apolonia Sokol, Bahia, 2022, Oil on linen, 92 x 65 cm
AN HOMAGE TO "BOYSAN"
An homage to the late LGBTQ+ activist and friend Boysan Yakar who passed away in a car accident in 2015. The paintings were requested by the long-term partner of Boysan Yakar who is also a close friend of the artist. Sokol started working on the painting while staying at her friend’s place, yet seeing her friend eaten by grief, she couldn’t manage to work on it and put the process on hold.
Apolonia Sokol, Boysan Alone_from a photo by Dilek, 2022, Oil on linen, 114 x 195 cm
Few years later, the artist herself experienced a very similar loss, inducing a very similar grieving period. Sokol could only recommence painting Boysan Yakar after dealing with her own grief.
Here, Yakar is standing alone and the portrait is inspired by a photograph shot by his friend, the photographer Dilek Yaman, in which he wears the same make-up. For Sokol, the pieces of gold applied to the ground beneath Yakar’s feet resembles chewing gum and reminds the artist of a mess.
Apolonia Sokol, Boysan with friends, 2022, Oil on linen, 114 x 195 cm
Here, Sokol chose to represent him with a crowd. His two other friends, Zeliş Deniz and Mert Serçe who died in the car accident with him are also portrayed next to Yakar on the canvas among a group of other friends, including Sokol herself.
SOKOL'S MOTHER; A RETROACTIVE INTEFERENCE
Inspired by a photograph that Sokol found of her mother, her husband and her lover who passed away looking punk, from the 1980s. The photograph was taken in Poland during the communist dictatorship, before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Apolonia Sokol, My Mother in the 80's Poland, 2022, Oil on linen, 196 x 156 cm
They're in the Bialowieza Forest, an important symbol in slavic countries; present in Tarkovsky movies the forest marks the border between Poland and Belarus. Considered as one of the savagest place in Europe, this forest is especially important for the artist as one of her closest friends was captured, tortured and abandoned by the KGB at this forest.
MORE ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in 1988 in Paris, Apolonia Sokol is a French-Danish figurative painter of Polish descent. After graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, she moved to the United States and settled in New York then in Los Angeles where she befriended other artists and painters with whom she started an ongoing conversation on figurative painting.
In the 2010's, she returned to Europe, lived in Brussels before moving back to Paris and traveled to Istanbul to see her friends: Turkish poet Lale Müldür and filmmakers Kaan Karacehennem and Franz von Bodelschwingh whom she had previously met while the duo was shooting their documentary film on Müldür in Paris.
While visiting them in Istanbul, the artist came accross prominent figures of the LGBTQ+ community among which activist Boysan Yakar who tragically past away along with his friends the feminist activist Zeliş Deniz and Mert Serçe. During one of her trips to Istanbul, Sokol was commissioned to paint the portrait of the late Boysan by his friend Kaan Karacehennem which led to the portraits Boysan Alone & Boysan With Friends exhibited in the gallery.
Sokol is known for her political stance on the art of portraiture, claiming the need to use it as a tool of empowerment and deconstruction of marginalization and domination.
That is why she addresses multiple issues such as feminisms, queerness, women's representation throughout art history, anti-racism and body politics in general.
