APOLONIA SOKOL

Apolonia Sokol’s figurative paintings introduce portraiture and autofiction into scenes inspired by canonical works from art history and contemporary issues around feminism and queer identity. Her paintings operate at the intersection of matter and memory. Pigments, binders, and surfaces operate not only as material elements but also as vehicles for recollection. Working primarily through portraiture, she draws from her immediate surroundings, yet her works exceed the role of contemporary chronicle.

Sokol’s paintings often present a 1:1 scale. They position the subject’s eyes in direct confrontation with the viewer’s gaze, evoking a repossession of their own identities and stories, conveying simultaneously a sense of boundary and its transgression, of strength through vulnerability. Positioned in open perspectives and unusually flat spaces bordering on abstraction, the figures seem to respond to the space of the painting with their extended, elongated and angled limbs. Each scene she paints, however ordinary, is charged with accumulated references: fragments of art history and the visual language of social movements. Even the abstract backgrounds carry a spectral presence, as if inhabited by ghosts.

Through her iconographic engagement with art historical canon and her choice of subjects such as childbirth, abortion, public demonstrations, and racialized and/or queer bodies, Sokol seeks to witness and affect the present while revealing the blindspots of Western painting and troubling male-centric histories of art and their omissions. Her practice responds to a time when images risk dissolution through overproduction, circulation, and disembodiment. By insisting on their materiality, Sokol restores density and vitality to images, shaping them through the chemistry of pigments. Her work gives viewers images anchored both in the physical world and in the cultural memory that is constantly at risk of erasure.

Apolonia Sokol (b. 1988, Paris) lives and works in Paris, France.

A French figurative painter of Polish descent, Sokol graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2015 and moved first to New York where she worked in Dan Colen’s studio.

Her work was presented in the following solo exhibitions : ISLAWIO at THE PILL in 2024, Apolonia Sokol at Arken Museum in 2023, You Better Paint Me* and I Had Trouble Sleeping, But She Said She Loved Me… at THE PILL (Istanbul, 2022 & 2018); Attic, a duo presentation with Walker Evans, Sebastien Ricou (Brussels, 2016) and Process Is Desire, whitcher projects (Los Angeles, 2016).

Her work has been shown in several group exhibitions organized by international institutions such as Copyists, Centre Pompidou (Metz, 2025), The Artist Colony show, The Nivaagaard Collection (Nivå, 2024), Painters’ Day, Musée d’Orsay, (Paris, 2024), Love is Louder, BOZAR, (Brussels, 2024), Immortelle, MOCO Panacée (Montpellier, 2023); Entre tes yeux et les images que j’y vois* (A Sentimental Choice), Fondation Pernod Ricard (Paris, 2022), L’ami·e modèle (Commissioned by Yvon Lambert Foundation), Viva Villa, MUCEM (Marseille, 2022); Women Painting Women, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas, 2022); Women and Change, ARKEN Museum for Modern Art (Copenhagen, 2022); She - Classicità, Polana Institute (Warsaw, 2021); Conversation Piece | Part VII Towards Narragonia, Fondazione Memmo, (Rome, 2021); ECCO, Villa Médicis (Rome, 2021); Tainted Love II, (Villa Arson, Nice, 2019) and En Forme de Vertige, Révélation Emerige Prize, Villa Emerige (Paris, 2017). 

In 2020, Apolonia Sokol was the laureate of the prestigious Academy of France and became one of the residents of Villa Medici for 2020-2021. In 2023 the HBO produced documentary “Apolonia, Apolonia” directed by Léa Glob which follows Sokol’s life and career over a decade had a sweeping run at film festivals across the globe, including Best Feature Length documentary at IDFA, Best Documentary at Hong Kong International Film Festival  and Best Nordic Documentary at Goteborg Film Festival among others.