Karolina Jabłońska

Painter, co-founder of the Potencja group and gallery. Born in 1991 in Niedomice, Jabłońska lives and works in Kraków.

Header picture

Picture size

extra large (default)

Podpis obrazka (umieszczony pod zdjęciem)

Karolina Jabłońska, photo: Galeria Raster

Text positon (deprecated)

Center

She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, where she received her diploma in Leszek Misiak’s studio in 2015. Already in her early works painted during her studies, the main character of Jabłońska’s paintings is herself, or rather a figure with her facial features. As the artist said in an interview with Wojciech Szymański for magazine Szum: ‘I am a model for myself, but my paintings are not necessarily self-portraits.’

Jabłońska, however, characteristically transforms her image, grotesquely exaggerating the features of her physiognomy rather than striving for realism, let alone idealisation. Big brown eyes, hair combed smoothly back, a wide smile, or rather a grimace neither of joy nor of pain, are characteristic elements of this stylised image, as are bulky bodies with hands as big as shovels and ‘rubbery’, unnaturally bending limbs. Scenery is built backstage, characters flattened as in a cartoon, colours over-saturated. Due to this simplified anatomy and construction of the composition, combined with forest and fanciful, tropical sceneries, which often appeared in Jabłońska’s early works, the painter’s works were perceived as resembling the ‘naïve’ paintings of Henri Rousseau.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Karolina Jabłońska, "Fight", 2018, photo courtesy of the artist / Galeria Raster

Picture image

walka_olej_na_plonie_200x250cm2018_foto_raster.jpg

However, unreal, conventional scenery is combined in these early paintings with references to a reality closer to the artist, namely the landscape of the Małopolska countryside. Jabłońska portrays herself with a cat and a chicken among naked autumn trees; in another painting, a rooster climbs up a palm tree trunk and a mongrel lies in the postcard-blue water at their base. The associations with Rousseau are not unfounded, but the range of art-historical references in Jabłońska’s paintings is much broader and includes paintings from the early Renaissance to the symbolism of the turn of the 20th century.

In Jabłońska’s paintings we can find painterly quotations from Paul Gauguin, Johann Heinrich Füssli, Albrecht Dürer or Agnolo Bronzino. These references are not merely winks and a confirmation that the artist has ‘done her homework’ on the canon of European art history, but also a pretext to look at this canon with fresh eyes, to ask about the topicality and contemporary meaning of iconographic motifs and specific representations with a long history. When Jabłońska evokes Dürer’s Self-Portrait in Fur, she paints herself in a simple woollen sheepskin coat with a half-dead cat on her head. Referring to one of the first self-portraits of this kind in the history of the Northern Renaissance, indicating the changing, valued position of the artist (or more specifically, the painter), she reflects on today’s perception of the painting profession and her own position as a young artist in a specific social, political and cultural context.

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Karolina Jabłońska, "Falling Down", oil on canvas, 2019, photo courtesy of the artist / Galeria Raster

Picture image

upadek_olej_na_plotnie190x175_2019.jpg

In other cases, the original context of the works quoted is replaced by contemporary scenery. Clothes in the Woods is reminiscent of Yves Tanguy’s surreal landscapes, except that it is set in the grey reality of a Kraków winter. The clothes of the title lie scattered on a thin layer of snow like rubbish thrown ashore by the waves, the wind blowing plastic gloves and handkerchiefs into the air. Caravaggio’s The Fortune Teller is transferred to the setting of a second-rate nightclub, where the gesture can be read as a pick-up scene. Adam and Eve from Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden are seen emerging from the darkness, shrouded in blue light, seemingly in a room illuminated only by the glow of a computer or television screen, and in a black and white spray drawing of the same motif, Adam gains an additional attribute in the form of a cigarette. The momentous biblical scene is transformed into a spectacle reminiscent of a late-night stagger home after a party gone wrong.

Gender roles play an important role in the re-evaluation of historical images. The 2016 painting Vampire (Munch) is a direct response to a whole series of depictions of a female vampire impaling herself on a man’s neck by Edvard Munch. In Jabłońska’s version, however, the heroine is not a demonic temptress; as Karolina Plinta wrote in the catalogue text accompanying the exhibition Dziewczyna Czy Tygrys? (Girl or a Tiger?) at the Municipal Art Centre in Gorzów Wielkopolski: ‘the woman does not so much suck the blood out of the man as she tenderly hugs him. Her eyes are half-closed, she exudes tenderness, and the man trustingly leans on her.’

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Karolina Jabłońska, "Clothes in the Woods", oil on canvas, 2021, photo: courtesy of the artist / Galeria Raster

Picture image

ciuchy_na_bloniach_200x185cm_2021.jpg

This gesture, however, is not entirely unambiguous. The expression on the protagonist’s face seems to betray weariness and irritation, the calm and balance seem very fragile. For in Jabłońska’s universe of painting there is rarely room for gestures of tenderness. When the heroine is embraced by the arm of a man invisible in the painting, it is a large, hairy male paw that grabs her in a firm, not necessarily caring embrace. In some paintings the threat is only implied but in most works the violence becomes very direct. Angry cats bite each other and attack humans, driving their fangs and claws into each other’s hands; humans tug at each other’s hair, pound their fists straight into each other’s jaws and under each other’s eyes, screaming at each other, gushing drops of saliva.

At the same time, thanks to the grotesque convention, the violence in Jabłońska’s paintings is still to some extent playful, unreal and cartoonish – as in the portraits in which the heroine, like Saint Denis, holds her own severed head in her hands. At the same time, certain motifs treated in the iconographic tradition as mythological anecdotes devoid of much emotional weight, gain a disturbing face in Jabłońska’s work. In several depictions of the nymph and satyr motif, the title theme resembles not so much innocent courtship, but a scene of brutal sexual violence. However, such depictions can also be ambiguous at times, as in the case of the painting Nineteenth Century Girl (2015). Inspired by a drawing by the 19th-century Czech artist Josef Mánes, the composition depicts a naked female figure being groped by male hands. Karolina Plinta wrote: ‘The woman does not shy away, although the situation is slightly oppressive (after all, it is seven curious hands). One of the paws even puts a finger in her mouth, which she will probably start sucking on immediately. So she draws clear pleasure from this ambiguous situation.’

Picture display

standardowy (864px desktop)

Karolina Jabłońska, "Boiling Head", oil on canvas, 2022, photo courtesy of the artist / Galeria Raster

Picture image

gotujaca_sie_glowa_olej_na_plotnie_150x150cm2022.jpg

In 2020, a series of more intimate paintings was created, documenting the experience of a period of isolation, in which a character with the artist’s features no longer appears in the context of relationships with other people, but confined within four walls. The colour tonality narrows here to greys, broken blues, greens and violets, the compositions become claustrophobically cramped and confined, the rhythm of day and night is disrupted. So we watch daytime falling asleep and nighttime slumbering in the studio, sketching and lying on the floor among scattered books, newspapers and clothes. In the paintings from 2021, sometimes the protagonist herself disappears, and what remains are objects – still lifes of clothes thrown into a pile – which, however, are still primarily about people: ‘One goes back, drops it in a frenzy, and then it all lies like that. Proof of a human being’ – said the artist.

In her most recent paintings, Jabłońska takes the characteristic features of her painting even further – the realistic elements become more and more detailed and the grotesque macabre more and more exaggerated. In a series of ‘winter’ paintings from 2022, the artist depicts, among other things, the making of a snowball or a monumental, closely framed self-portrait with a fragment of her face, in which she captures with almost photographic accuracy an eye that runs with tears in the cold and snowflakes that settle and melt after a while on her hair and eyebrows. Heat and cold become even more evocative in other images from this year – we watch the protagonist’s head frozen in a block of ice or emerging from a pot in which borscht is boiling. However, both still have the same aim – to show observations, feelings and emotions that are to some extent universal. As the artist said in a conversation with Wojciech Szymański:

Text

I would never say that I am a ‘surrealist painter’. It’s very realistic painting, just filtered through the old masters, who are still a big influence on me. In view of the fact that I am a completely average and standard representative of my generation and there is nothing unusual about me, perhaps I can fulfil the role of an everywoman.

Selected solo exhibitions:

2022 – Chłód (Cold), Raster Gallery, Warsaw;

2021 – No Rest For The Weary, Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, USA;

2020 – Hyperbole, Zeller van Almsick, Vienna, Austria;

2020 – No Man Is Big Enough for My Arms, WOP Works on Paper, Vienna, Austria;

2018 – Slippery, Raster Gallery, Warsaw;

2017 – Dziewczyna czy tygrys? (Girl or Tiger?), Municipal Art Centre, Gorzów Wielkopolski;

2016 – Ludzka Rzecz (Human Thing), Szara Kamienica Gallery, Kraków;

2016 – Nowa Para Oczu (A New Pair of Eyes), Potency, Kraków.

Selected group exhibitions:

2022 – Niepokój Przychodzi o Zmierzchu (Anxiety Comes at Dusk), Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw;

2021 – Potencja: Teoria Humoralna (Potency: A Humoral Theory), BWA Zielona Góra;

2021 – Mainly for Women, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, USA;

2020 – On the Politics of Delicacy, Capitain Petzel, Berlin, Germany;

2020 – Duch Natury i Inne Bajki (The Spirit of Nature and Other Fairy Tales), Silesian Museum, Katowice, Poland;

2019 – Soundcheck, Rondo Sztuki, Katowice;

2019 – The Artist as Muse, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, USA;

2019 – Farba Znaczy Krew (Paint Means Blood), Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw;

2018 – New Perspectives: Leipzig Meets Cracow, Spinnerei Archiv Massiv, Leipzig, Germany;

2018 – Komunikacja ze Wszystkim Co Jest (Communicating With All That Is), Stefan Gierowski Foundation, Warsaw;

2018 – Ozimina, Widna, Kraków;

2018 – Lifehack, One Dva Tři Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic;

2017 – 43rd Painting Biennale Bielska Jesień, Bielska Galeria BWA, Bielsko-Biała;

2017 – Szwung, Schwarz Contemporary, Berlin, Germany;

2017 – XY: New Generation Polish-Hungarian Painting, MODEM Center for Modern and Contemporary Arts, Debrecen, Hungary;

2017 – Seans, Szara Gallery, Katowice;

2017 – Potency, Raster Gallery, Warsaw;

2014 – Winter is Coming, Szara Kamienica Gallery, Kraków;

2014 – Lepiej Mieć Horyzont Wąski… (Better to be Narrow-Minded...), Zderzak Gallery, Kraków.

21st century painting

contemporary polish painters

contemporary polish painting

polish visual arts

woman painters