For the uninitiated, it’s fair to say that the life and work of French-Polish portrait painter Apolonia Sokol has been far from ordinary thus far.

From battling cancer as a child and growing up poor in a theatre in Paris, to navigating the art world and brushing shoulders with the famous (and infamous, such as Harvey Weinstein in Los Angeles), Sokol’s journey to the highest echelon of the international contemporary art scene has already been a tale for the books.

But Sokol has not forgotten her roots; she paints the disenfranchised, the misfits and the outcasts of her generation to global critical acclaim with captivating heart and soul.

And she truly embodies her art. The New York Times even described the docu-biography about her creative evolution – Apolonia, Apolonia by the Danish director Lea Glob – as a portrait of “life itself”.

Fresh from a solo-exhibition at Copenhagen’s Arken Museum, in this episode of PowerLunch Sokol is interviewed by her old boarding school friend of over two decades, publicist Nicolai Bonnén Rossen, who ventures warmly to described her as “a contemporary crossover of Marina Abramovic and Frida Kahlo”.