The heroine of the works of Karolina Jabłońska (born 1991) and Sophie Thun (born 1985) is a young woman, an artist seeking personal liberation and empowerment in art. Room Tour is an exhibitionist inspection of the space in which she creates. A room of one’s own, once a symbol of creative emancipation, now becomes a space of loneliness and melancholy in the time of the pandemic and the social isolation it has imposed. In the painterly and photographic images of Jabłońska and Thun, autoerotic and vanitas motifs intertwine with reflection on the medium as an instrument for representation, and assertiveness also understood as a right to be unproductive. These images include allusions to classical iconography and contemporary media reality. Jabłońska’s painting is characterized by an individual, expressive style, whose hallmarks are a tendency to rescaling and deformation, and a multihued light stressing the plasticity of the bodies. In turn, Thun’s unique photographs have a post-media character, combining classical photographic technique with performative elements. In the photograms, the artist’s body is present simultaneously as a photographic image and as an illuminated trace, a kind of physical reflection. The motif of the self-portrait recurs many times in Room Tour as an ambivalent figure of creative autonomy and isolation, strength and exhaustion.
