Reflecting on gendered and racialized bodies in representation throughout history, Apolonia Sokol’s paintings often depict her friends, lovers, and collaborators as icons of radical subjectivity. “L'Opération” blends autobiographical elements with deep art historical referencing. On one hand, the painting depicts the operation undergone by a very young Apolonia Sokol suffering from melanoma of the bladder, in a Catholic hospital. An illness to which she owed her keen interest in painting, as she was surrounded by nuns and left this period infatuated with religious imagery. On the other hand, Sokol integrates into her canvas an iconographic scheme that has long shaped our memory: “L’Opération” is, in fact, a direct homage to the “Operation” painted by German New Objectivity painter Christian Schad in 1929, which was itself a reinterpretation of Rembrandt’s canonical “Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” (1632). As such, the painting is emblematic of Apolonia Sokol’s iconographic engagement with art historical canon and mythological figures, and of her use of portraiture and pictorial fiction as tools of political empowerment in the present.