Teresa Panasiuk

Teresa Panasiuk (1938, Warsaw — 2021) studied between 1958 and 1964, first at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, in the studio of Krystyna Łada-Studnicka, and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw — under Artur Nacht-Samborski, one of the leading Colourists, for whom colour “shaped form” and attained its own “resonance”. From this school she carried away a sensitivity to colour that became the foundation of her entire body of work.

Between 1972 and 1980 she ran the Warsaw Gallery of Contemporary Art at the Old Town Cultural Centre, taking up the role of curator in 1974. In doing so she continued the work of Marian Bogusz and the former Krzywe Koło Gallery — the most important centre of the avant-garde in Warsaw in the 1950s and 1960s, which produced, among others, Stefan Gierowski and Rajmund Ziemski, and the sculptors Alina Szapocznikow and Magdalena Więcek. Panasiuk was therefore not only a painter but also a co-creator of the institutional continuity of Polish abstraction.

Her own subject — for almost her entire career — was landscape. Early matter-based canvases close to Art Informel gave way in the 1970s to a radical synthesis: the landscape was reduced to the line of the horizon and to light passing through layers of paint. All the classic attributes of landscape — plants, buildings, clouds, figures — disappeared from her paintings, while the compositions, contrary to tradition, took on a vertical format usually reserved for the portrait.

Colour remained the key. Applied seemingly flatly, it in fact built depth from many layers and glimmers; critics wrote of canvases “composed as abstractly as music”. Panasiuk worked in oil, but she especially valued gouache and paper: “Gouache is not a sketch for a painting,” she said of her work; “quite the opposite — the inspiration for a gouache is the oil.”

At a time when official policy promoted Socialist Realism, abstraction was a space of freedom. Cut off by the Iron Curtain from the classics of colour field painting — Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko — Panasiuk arrived in parallel at kindred solutions, while keeping the horizon as an anchor linking the painting to reality. This was shown most fully by the exhibition “Horizon” (2024), which set her painting alongside the work of Stefan Gierowski.

During her lifetime she showed her work at nearly thirty solo exhibitions — in Warsaw and Łódź, as well as in Paris, Berlin, Roskilde and Lund. She belongs to a generation of women artists who — like Alina Szapocznikow, rooted in the same Krzywe Koło — remained for decades on the margins of the principal narratives of art history, and whose achievement is only now being reread and written into the canon.