Karolina Jabłońska Cutting Onions, 2025

Cutting Onions is part of on an ongoing series by Karolina Jabłońska featuring a characteristic self-portrait, invoked, in this work, merely through the representation of bushy brows, curved eyelids, and wavy strands of hair.

The figure’s forehead is portrayed upside down, set aside on a wooden chopping board on top of a kitchen table. The chestnut shade of her curls somewhat vanishes into the wooden surface, as tears escape her shut eyes towards the canvas’s upper edge. While the deliberate use of a cropped composition introduces a sense of ambiguity, the counter-gravitational tears bespeak the reduction of the feminine figure's agency to impossible weeping.

Picturing facial vis-à-vis vegetable tissue, Jabłońska likens the tradition of preserving fruits and vegetables in jars – a tradition the artist observed in her childhood as she followed her grandmother through the harsh climate of rural Poland – with the procedures applied to uphold youthful femininity. While the figure appears passive at first sight, her tearful affectivity unravels a state of “quiet panic” beneath the surface. This oxymoron, and the humoristic way by which she represents psychic suffering, is characteristic of Jabłońska’s commentary on how Polish women’s bodies are policed and controlled, not least by their traditional domestic labor.