Nobody's Mother: Apolonia Sokol
Communiqué de presse
T H E P I L L® is thrilled to present Apolonia Sokol’s third solo exhibition in Istanbul, from December 6, 2025, to February 24, 2026. Titled Nobody's Mother, the exhibition features new paintings that explore the themes of motherhood and mothering understood as a complex biological, psychological, cultural, and political phenomenon at the forefront of current societal changes, engaging critically with its manifold art historical representations. 
 
A central motif in the exhibition is the binary opposition between woman-as-mother and woman-as-whore, terms of the Freudian psychological complex. This tension is articulated in the painting Madonna Whore Complex, which directly cites Polish painter Andrzej Wróblewski's Two Married Women (1949). It depicts two women - one with a newborn, the other with an animal that oscillates between dog and wolf. Rather than reiterating the binary, Sokol foregrounds its instability. Deployed and multiplied across a series of smaller portraits, the archetypes appear reversible, coexistent, and ultimately insufficient as frameworks for representing female-identifying subjects, as every portrait in Sokol’s hands turns into a complex, multilayered web of ambivalent provocation. 
 
Bordering on abstraction, Joan Miró’s small-sized, painterly depiction of Femme-Monument (1970) - in the mise en abime created by the painting of a sculpture representing a brush soap as Woman - opens the exhibition with a humorous take on how women have been reduced to a whole and an egg across centuries. Much like an inside joke, the body of the sculpture in Miró’s figuration is, in fact, inspired by the shape of the brush soap in every painter’s studio, worn down by the repetitive gliding of brushes across its center. Somewhere between seeing the shape of the female genitals on such a surface, and “erecting” it as a monument to female form, lies the patriarchal,  male-centric projection, objectifying the ‘female (m)other’ as a simple extension of the ‘self’ and one’s own desire, foregrounding the complex mentioned above. 
 
Sokol consciously inscribes her practice into a lineage of socially committed figurative works by artists such as Christian Schad, Andrzej Wróblewski, Luchita Hurtado, Paula Rego, and Alice Neel. Throughout the 20th century, these artists depicted nonconforming figures and relationships in their own contexts, wielding figuration as a tool to articulate marginalized, disavowed, and structurally excluded realities. Though appearing as figurative portraiture, Sokol’s paintings compose an abstract language through solid, flat color planes achieved by meticulous, highly controlled layering and geometric lines. In this exhibition, her use of sweet, soft pastel tones contrasts playfully with the subject matter, achieving an intense dramatic effect with minimal means.  Is motherhood the primary or even necessary locus of womanhood? Contrary to natalist and naturalist paradigms, Sokol highlights birth as a complex and ambivalent process. While generative, birth is also marked by physical and psychological carnage, as postpartum grief attests. At the intersection of political contestation and patriarchal family governance, the process of birth remains paradoxically under-supported medically, socially, and psychologically.
 
Sokol’s large-scale canvases underscore the proximity of life and death, birth and grief, and emphasize the need for forms of collective care, accompaniment and witnessing in these threshold experiences. In Abortion, a male partner is depicted as a caring witness to his partner’s suffering - born of our wishful thinking. In Annunciation, inspired by Felice Casorati’s work of the same title from 1927, Sokol herself, through a decapitated self-portrait, becomes the receiver of a pregnancy annunciation - the moment is depicted as one of dissociation. Alongside the artist’s witnessing of her friends’ experiences with motherhood, the viewer is invited in turn to witness Sokol's refusal to give birth and her grieving process—particularly in the painting titled You & Me, which incorporates her close friend, Ukrainian feminist activist Oxana Shachko, as an inseparable part of her own body.
 
While Nobody’s Mother rejects biological motherhood, it simultaneously broadens the concept of motherhood to include non-biological, interspecies, and queer forms of kinship. Recognizing the profound impact of queer epistemologies and reproductive technologies over the past three decades, Sokol proposes an understanding of gender, womanhood, and care that exceeds biological reproduction and reconfigures the politics of relationality itself.
 
 
Apolonia Sokol (b. 1988, Paris) lives and works between Paris, France, and Copenhagen, Denmark.
 
A French figurative painter of Polish descent, Sokol was born and raised in Paris, before moving to Denmark. Having returned to Paris during her formative years, she graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2015. Her work was presented in the following solo exhibitions : ISLAWIO at THE PILL in 2024, Apolonia Sokol at Arken Museum in 2023, You Better Paint Me* and I Had Trouble Sleeping, But She Said She Loved Me… at THE PILL (Istanbul, 2022 & 2018); Attic, a duo presentation with Walker Evans, Sebastien Ricou (Brussels, 2016) and Process Is Desire, whitcher projects (Los Angeles, 2016).
 
Her work has been shown in several group exhibitions organized by institutions such as Copyists, Centre Pompidou (Metz, 2025), The Artist Colony show, The Nivaagaard Collection (Nivå, 2024), Painters’ Day, Musée d’Orsay, (Paris, 2024), Love is Louder, BOZAR, (Brussels, 2024), Immortelle, MOCO Panacée (Montpellier, 2023); Entre tes yeux et les images que j’y vois* (A Sentimental Choice), Fondation Pernod Ricard (Paris, 2022), L’ami·e modèle (Commissioned by Yvon Lambert Foundation), Viva Villa, MUCEM (Marseille, 2022); Women Painting Women, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas, 2022); Women and Change, ARKEN Museum for Modern Art (Copenhagen, 2022); She - Classicità, Polana Institute (Warsaw, 2021); Conversation Piece | Part VII Towards Narragonia, Fondazione Memmo, (Rome, 2021); ECCO, Villa Médicis (Rome, 2021); Tainted Love II, (Villa Arson, Nice, 2019) and En Forme de Vertige, Révélation Emerige Prize, Villa Emerige (Paris, 2017). 
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