Karolina Jabłońska The Beetroot Head, 2024

Presenting her distinctive figurative style, Karolina Jabłońska's painting explores the politics of everyday life through quotidian subject matter.

The work depicts a monumentally sized jar filled with pickled fruit and vegetables rendered in vibrant pinks and reds. Jabłońska’s expressive use of color, undulating lines and distorted perspective, call attention to the wide range of art historical sources that have influenced her practice. Thus, the likeness looking at the viewer recalls the tour de force distortions of Italian Mannerist painter Parmigianino and his Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, a work Jabłońska has frequently cited in other of her works.

Yet, the painting also addresses another concern in Jabłońska’s practice, namely the traditional role assigned to women. The severed head apparently stored in or hiding behind a jar, suggests an allegory for the entrapment of women, and by implication the existential threat to their bodies and restrictions imposed by political realities. Influenced by the feminist movements that have reshaped civil society in Poland, Jabłońska uses the immediacy of her figurative depictions to viscerally explore the politics of gendered domestic spaces.