Karolina Jabłońska Head on a Plate, 2025

Executed in oil on canvas, Head on a Plate represents a self-portrait, a recurring motif bequeathed by the artist’s study years. Jabłońska’s pictorial alter-ego meticulously explores multiple identities and psychic realities.

Stretching across the large-scale format, with the canvas’s lower edge cutting the portrait just below the figure’s neck, the pictorial space is occupied by a face conveying feminine features, dished up, framed by beets, roots, and charming curls in chestnut brown. The work’s theme, then, references the canonical painterly exploration of the biblical story of Salome with the Head of John the Baptist. Read through the framework formulated by cultural feminism, Salome’s story spells out the policing of female desire. Head on a Plate, however, consists of a cropped composition that throws narrativization into conflict. The viewer is left with an ambiguous image, since the plated head is cut by format, not sword. The work rather functions as an allegory for the constitutive relationship between the visible and invisible, marked by the mute trace of a preceding force.