In his work, Sobocki most often touches on issues that affect him personally. For him, art is an expression of his attitude towards reality, and he communicates it most directly through self-portraits as if he wanted to measure the world by himself. ‘Here is me, who can be you’ – said the artist about his self-portraits.
They are a particular kind of commentary on reality, sometimes flavoured with humour, at other times grotesque and moralising. His best-known series in this genre comes from the 1970s: the painting entitled Coffin Portraits (1974-76) and the lithographic Biography (both from 1974-77). In the Coffin Portraits series, the artist placed his image on various types of metal sheets and plates, found road signs or old washtubs.
In the series of paintings entitled Self-Portraits, Sobocki depicts himself in various poses, sometimes dressed in symbolic costumes, sometimes naked, and almost always accompanied by attributes that complete the symbolic meaning of the work. Paintings from this series carry hidden, sometimes coded meanings and are often bitter and ironic. In the self-portrait diptych titled Three Roses (1978), one canvas shows the painter in a steel cuirass with a purple cape on his shoulders. The artist rests his right hand on his hip, whilst in his left he holds three purple roses. In the upper right corner, there is a heraldic cartouche. In the second painting, we can see the reflection of the artist’s face in the crumpled drawing and a tin can, into which the knight’s armour has turned.
In the painting Narcissus (1978), the artist sees himself in a drop of blood instead of water. The self-portrait Anno 1977 shows the painter as a figure associated both with Stańczyk and Rejtan, who in a gesture of helplessness tears a woollen sweater off himself. In 1982, the artist created a double self-portrait Polish Schizophrenia in which we can see two men: one of them is standing sideways with his eyes tied with a black band and is holding onto the arm of his guide.
In 1979, Sobocki organised the exhibition Poles’ Self-Portrait, showing his painting A Pole 1979, which presents a ‘camouflaged’ portrait of Pope John Paul II, whilst also being a self-portrait of the painter himself. During the exhibition, the painting became the object of pilgrimages, and flowers were even laid beneath it.
In the 1980s, Sobocki introduced religious motifs and national symbols to his paintings (Ecce Homo, Polonia), and in 1982 painted a portrait of Lech Wałęsa titled A Worker 1981. Later, in the 1990s, he produced works devoted primarily to the sphere of private life. This time, the artist reached back to his childhood memories, above all to the period of occupation. The starting material for many of these works were old photographs, which Sobocki enlarged and painted over, and then juxtaposed with new images, which created a special form of dialogue with the past (for example We Passed By). There were also illuminated landscapes and portrait series of the artist’s mother and his stepfather, usually depicted in their domestic surroundings. In recent years, the artist has returned to portraying the Pope, creating the paintings A Pole 2005 and A Pole 2006. The paintings are moving, touching on the theme of dignity in suffering.