Teresa Pągowska

Teresa Pągowska (1926, Warsaw - 2007, Warsaw) was one of the most outstanding Polish women painters, a professor of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, a representative of the Sopot school and the new figuration, associated with the Paris milieus of Réalités Nouvelles and the Nouvelle École de Paris. She received her diploma in 1951 at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznań; in 1950-1964 she taught at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, functioning in the circle of the charismatic Piotr Potworowski, and later she became associated with the schools in Łódź and Warsaw. Her painting never succumbed to Socialist Realism - she consistently went her own, distinct way.

In the 1960s Pągowska's painting came to be dominated by the motif of the strongly deformed, summarily treated human - mainly female - figure, shown in unexpected, dynamic, often dance-like arrangements, in a space built from patches of colour. The female figure recurs from then on as an anonymous, compact, strongly defined silhouette, arranging itself into the cycles „Days”, „Violence”, „Closed Interiors” and „Magical Figures”. „What occupies me most deeply is the human figure - I believe that it is precisely the human being that contains the most magic of content”, the artist said.

Pągowska handled colour masterfully, but she also proved that the picture need not be subordinated to it - as in the ascetic „Monochromes”, painted in a disciplined, narrow range, or in works introducing raw canvas as a painterly value. Already in 1961, invited by the critic Peter Selz, she found herself - as one of two women, alongside Teresa Rudowicz - in the famous exhibition „Fifteen Polish Painters” at MoMA in New York. A laureate of the Jan Cybis Award (2001), she was given the retrospective „I Am Me” at the Spectra Art Space in Warsaw (2022).