Karolina Jabłońska The Egg Maker, 2025

Executed in oil on canvas, The Egg Maker 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.

Splayed across the canvas, the depicted head may well be of a giantess, all the while resembling the painter herself. Below bushy brows, chestnut brown eyes spiked with spider leg-like lashes pop out of the ivory palette applied evenly, rendering the flatness of the canvas visible within the figure’s facial expression. Her look, plainly put, is as grim as the canvas is flat. Featuring a hand, palms facing upwards, that holds three eggs below the figure’s nose as though she was meant to smell them, the composition slithers into absurdity. Just above the canvas’s lower edge, dangling from the slim gold necklace around the figure’s neck, hangs a tiny chicken pendant.