Paintings tell stories, shape narratives, colour reality, retouch history, and Apolonia Sokol is fully aware of their significance. At first glance, Sokol’s works may be considered portraits in a completely traditional sense, though there is really nothing traditional about them at all. On the contrary, rather than having royals and aristocrats as her motifs, Sokol is interested in portraying people who live on the fringes of society instead: artists and activists who break the norms. You can learn more about the artist behind these modern, colourful and rebellious portraits here.

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^{Apolonia Sokol. Photo: Lasse Dearman}

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1. Sokol is Polish-French and was born in France in 1988. She grew up in a bohemian environment at her parents’ avant-garde theatre, a theatre that was later forcibly closed down by the authorities, and this creative and rebellious environment became a natural starting point for her own artistic and activist work.

2. In Sokol’s pictures we find an intimate personal gallery. They can be family members, friends or lovers of the artist. They all radiate in their diversity, but what they all have in common is that they are people with heads full of dreams and nightmares, people enchanted or plagued by love and conflict. All of them are portrayed with great tenderness and personality, and Sokol herself has described how, for her, it is impossible to separate her art from her own identity.

3. In the mid-1990s, when Sokol’s parents divorced, she moved with her mother to Denmark. Sokol was eight years old and struggled to find a foothold as an immigrant in a foreign country, a new culture. She knew she wanted to be an artist, but she didn’t know how. She later returned to Paris, where in 2015 she graduated from one of Europe’s finest and most traditional art academies, the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Today she teaches as a professor at the École Supérieure d’Arts et Médias in Caen/Cherbourg.

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^{Apolonia Sokol. Foto: Lasse Dearman}
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References:
Andreas Bro, ”Janteloven fik hende til at forlade Danmark for at jagte drømmen. Nu taler alle om Apolonias malerier”, DR, P3, March 9, 2024.
Maxwell Rabb, ”In Portraits of Her Friends, and a New Documentary, Apolonia Sokol Turns Her Life into Art”, Artsy, January 2, 2024.