Kraków-based artist Karolina Jabłońska's works are populated by young women with exaggerated facial features, drawn from the artist's own image as a generalised self-portrait, who engage in both ordinary and unusual actions. While she has created digital animations and ceramics, Jabłońska primarily works with oil painting.
Read MoreBorn in 1991 in Niedomice, Poland, Jabłońska attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków between 2010 and 2015. There, she founded the artist group Potencja [Potency] with fellow students Tomasz Kręcicki and Cyryl Polaczek. In 2016, the three artists co-founded the Kraków-based artist-run space by the same name, where they showed works by Polish artists Radek Szlęzak, Nic Ciekawego, and Martyna Kielesińska, among others.
Jabłońska first began painting her protagonists in 2012, when she portrayed them posing as various professionals that she could potentially become in the future. The figures at this time did not have their characteristic facial features, but over time developed prominent eyebrows, large brown eyes, and long hair.
The young women in Jabłońska's paintings often appear to be in intensely emotional states, screaming, crying, or punching someone else. Even the mundane act of exchanging eye contact obtains a sense of suffocating violence in works like Eyes or Three Eyes (both 2017), where Jabłońska paints the eyes extremely close to each other.
Discussing motifs that recur throughout her paintings and exhibitions, the artist told Ocula Magazine that 'I never create my exhibitions as closed projects ... It is more like I catch the idea, take it out from the paintings and then it can become the "frame".'
Karolina Jabłońska has held solo exhibitions at the State Gallery of Art (PGS), Sopot (2024); Esther Schipper, Berlin (2024); Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Raster Gallery, Warsaw (2019).
Group exhibitions at Dallas Contemporary, Texas (2024); BWA Bielsko Biała (2022); BWA Zielona Gora (2021); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2021); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2019).
Karolina Jabłońska's website can be found here and Instagram can be found here.
Ocula | 2024
