PARIS.- Esther Schipper is presenting Karolina Jabłońska’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, her first at our Paris space. On view are sixteen newly commissioned oil paintings executed on canvas and wood. The presentation is accompanied by an essay by the curator and researcher Mėta Valiušaitytė; the following is an excerpt from her comprehensive text, available at the gallery and online.
In Jarred Kitchen, Karolina Jabłońska stages encounters with food preparation: cutting, storing, displaying. Her new series explores the paradoxes of preservation, turning the kitchen into a stage where humor, memory, and the female body and labor converge. The large canvases submerge the viewer: monumental female heads, painted on two-meter supports, draw one into a world of giantesses. When their eyes are not closed, their gazes are watchful, yet distant, as if estranged from their domestic surroundings. The smaller works lead viewers into the intimacy of a pantry. Glass jars are filled with pickled cucumbers, beetroots, and red berries––but amid them float fragments of human bodies.
Jabłońska’s dark humor turns domestic scenes into sites of tension and estrangement. The motif of the head recurs throughout her work. Modeled on her own features, it is a face she once learned to draw quickly and now reintroduces as needed, almost as a ready-made image. In The Egg Maker, a pale face fills the whole surface, but is unexpectedly muzzled by a hand resting beneath its softly curved nose. This palm is also a nest and carries three eggs. As the artist notes, the painting evokes the sensation of a “lump in the throat,” a moment of tension between release and containment.
While the paintings featuring the artist’s alter-ego are executed on large linen canvases, the smaller works are painted on wooden panels. Measuring barely twenty by fifteen centimeters, they are only slightly larger than a human hand. Jabłońska began working on small wooden supports when she was first searching for a way to archive motifs from her larger paintings. Acquiring panels originally used for icon painting and priming and polishing them meticulously herself, she found pleasure in the slow, devotional process. Some of her panels present a jar placed on a wooden surface, rendered with the stillness of a Cézanne-like portrait of things. The act of preserving summer abundance for winter survival has deep roots in Polish domestic culture. In Jabłońska’s works these jars, known in Poland as “słoiki,” become not only containers of food, but also transparent vessels of memory: memories of survival in uncertain times, of foresight, and of invisible female labor. Jabłońska’s paintings transform those memories into allegory, where the kitchen becomes a theater of awkward gestures. The exhibition is a pantry of personal mythology, where humor and horror coexist.
Karolina Jabłońska was born in 1991 in Niedomice, Poland, and currently lives and works in Kraków. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. Residencies and fellowships include Scholarship in Vysoká škola uměleckoprůmyslová v Praze UMPRUM (2014-2015), LIA Programme Residency, Spinnerei Leipzig (2018), Fern Residency, Brussels (2021), Fores Project Residency, London (2022).
Her works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally. Notable institutional exhibitions include: The Woman Question 1550–2025, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (upcoming); Global Fascisms, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2025); Which Way the Wind is Blowing, Start Museum, Shanghai (2025); who’s afraid of cartoony figuration?, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas (2024); Sleeping and Waking, Krupa Art Foundation, Wrocław (2025); Karolina Jabłońska. Preserves. Works from 2023-2024, State Gallery of Art, Sopot (2024); How to be invisible, Esther Schipper, Berlin (2024); Dinner, Piana Gallery Foundation, Kraków (2023); No rest for the weary, Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); Mainly for Women, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2021); Paint also known as Blood, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2019); Sensation: Closer to the people, Kunstverein Schattendorf (2019).
Jabłońska’s work is held in the following collections: BY ART MATTERS, Hangzhou; Grażyna Kulczyk Collection, Mbank Collection, Warsaw; Start Museum, Shanghai; Pond Society, Shanghai; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig (MdbK); National Museum, Gdańsk; The ING Polish Art Foundation and the Steffen Hildebrand Collection/G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig.
