Apolonia Sokol — Islawio — The Pill Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Ends in 30 days: October 15, 2024 → January 15, 2025

Apolonia Sokol — Galerie The Pill, Paris Fort et frontal, le travail d’Apolonia Sokol trouve dans son exposition à la très belle nouvelle née branche parisienne de la galer... 2 - Bien Critique

The Pill is excited to inaugurate its expansion to Paris with Apolonia Sokol’s highly anticipated solo exhibition Islawio opening on October 15, 2024 at the gallery’s new address at 4, place de Valois.

This first monographic exhibition of Apolonia Sokol in France, titled after the acronym of a verse by the American poet Audre Lorde, I Shall Love Again When I’m Obsolete, gathers an ensemble of Sokol’s new paintings marking the present moment and an understanding of the world we currently inhabit within the long history of iconographic memory and of emotions conveyed by painting. Her large-scale work titled Massacre des Innocents is at first glance a reinterpretation of Picasso’s Guernica with its depiction of lifeless limbs and body parts emerging from a pile of rubble, itself framed by a desolate landscape, but it also includes references to less well-known depictions of war and its devastating effects on human life and psyche, such as Andrzej Wróblewski’s A Mother and Her Dead Child, (1949), or The Apotheosis of War by Vasily Vereshchagin (1871). The insidious relationship between violence and consent is at the heart of Consent, which takes the form of a self-portrait as Susanna, facing the viewer, her body spread open in a field of grass beneath symbols of the male gaze and patriarchy. Similar to Audre Lorde’s poetry, the uplifting, powerful anger that bursts from these paintings finds a counterbalance with Transsupport, conceived as an altarpiece with depictions of the artist’s studio representing her collaborators and friends bound together in love and grief, surrounding each other; and the process of painting as one of healing. In the tumultuous central piece depicting a protest for trans rights, collective action and public demonstration become activities of care and cure: what is revealed is also healed.

The opening night will host a series of performances by Azzedine Saleck, Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Noah Umur Kanber and a surprise guest, taking the forms of a make up tutorial, a reading and an interactive performance. Lea Glob’s award-winning feature documentary Apolonia, Apolonia will be screened in parallel in the gallery’s underground space.