
Apolonia Sokol
L'accouchement de Jehane Mahmoud, 2024
Oil on canvas
195 x 114 cm
Rooted in an intimate moment of shared care, L’Accouchement (2024) continues Apolonia Sokol’s iconographic interrogation of overlooked motifs in art history. The painting centers on the physiological birth of Jehane...
Rooted in an intimate moment of shared care, L’Accouchement (2024) continues Apolonia Sokol’s iconographic interrogation of overlooked motifs in art history. The painting centers on the physiological birth of Jehane Mahmoud—a close friend of the artist—assisted by a circle of companions, including a doula, whose hands and arms evoke tenderness, strength, and collective presence. Rendered in the warmth of a domestic interior, the composition becomes a site of radical representation: a deliberate inscription of childbirth into the canon of painting, where it has long been marginalized. The work was made in collaboration with a former classmate of Sokol’s at the École des Beaux-Arts, the photographer Jehane Mahmoud, who was herself giving birth for the first time. In contrast to the historical proliferation of death scenes across Western art, L’Accouchement asserts the generative and communal power of life-giving as both subject and symbol—an emblem of Sokol’s broader project to reimagine representation through political, personal, and mythological lenses.
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