Jarred Kitchen
Karolina Jabłońska
21 October – 20 December 2025
Esther Schipper, Paris
With her first Paris solo exhibition “Jarred Kitchen”, Karolina Jabłońska transforms the kitchen from an everyday space into a strange stage oscillating between memory, labour, preservation practices, and humour. Presented at Esther Schipper’s Paris space, the show brings together 16 new oil paintings created specifically for the project.
Two scales in tension: giant heads, tiny panels
The exhibition works with two contrasting scales:
On canvases exceeding two metres, enormous female heads derived from the artist herself appear. Their eyes are sometimes closed, sometimes wary—like giants alienated within the familiar silence of domestic interiors.
On small 20 × 15 cm wooden panels, body parts float among pickled beets, cucumbers, and red berries inside preserving jars.
These two extremes give the show a rhythm that is both comical and unsettling.
Jars: not just food, but vessels of memory
In Poland, the tradition of “słoiki”—preserving summer’s bounty for winter—becomes, in Jabłońska’s hands, a tool of personal mythology.
These jars do not merely contain food; they transparently display:
- the inner reflexes of uncertain times,
- invisible female labour,
- societal rituals of endurance and storage.
“The Egg Maker”: a lump in the throat
Among the works centred on the head motif, The Egg Maker shows a face that fills the entire surface, silenced by a hand placed beneath the soft line of the nose.
In the palm rest three eggs—the artist’s own description: “a lump in the throat.”
Holding and releasing, preserving and overflowing, protecting and restricting—all converge on the same surface.
Small panels that summon the icon tradition
The artist prepares her small-format works with the meticulous care borrowed from icon painting: sanding the wooden surface and applying delicate grounds. These panels open a quiet yet intense space opposite the dramatic power of the large canvases.
Why the exhibition matters
“Jarred Kitchen” positions the kitchen not merely as domestic routine but as a theatre where memory, women’s labour, preservation culture, personal rituals, and a peculiar humour take the stage.
By shifting the domestic realm onto an allegorical, tense, funny, and dark plane, Jabłońska creates a space that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.
