Teresa Pągowska
Teresa Pągowska
From 1945, she studied painting at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznań. In 1950, Pągowska moved to Sopot, becoming associated for the years with the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and the Sopot art scene.
From her debut in 1949, she took part in numerous exhibitions showcasing contemporary Polish painting (including the annual National Art Exhibitions, 1954–1959, and the National Exhibition of Young Artists. Against War – Against Fascism at the Arsenal, 1955); in 1959, she took part in the Paris Biennale of Young Artists. In the 1950s, she was involved in organising the Sopot Festival of Visual Arts – a regular nationwide review of contemporary art. In 1956, she chaired the organising committee, and in 1958 she organised an exhibition of Piotr Potworowski’s work as part of the Festival. Her collaboration and friendship with him helped her break free from the colour conventions of the Sopot school and turn towards a style of painting close to Informel and material painting. At the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, her individual style began to take shape. In 1964, she moved to Warsaw; the following years, during which she was not involved in teaching, constituted a period of intensive painting.
Since then, the artist is recognised for her intimate, felt depictions of the female figure and her innovative experiments with pure, unprimed canvas as a pictorial device. While not completely abstract, Pągowska’s figures – who dissolve or metamorphose in space – mark a transition from the machine-like modernist body that prevailed before the Second World War towards an emancipated, sensorial representation. In the 1960s, her painting was dominated by the motif of a heavily distorted, schematically rendered human figure, often depicted in dynamic, dance-like poses within a neutral space composed of patches of colour (the ‘Days’ series). From then on, the human figure—and particularly the female figure—appeared in her paintings as an anonymous, compact, strongly defined silhouette, and the artist’s work was situated within the broadly defined realm of New Figuration.
In 1971, Pągowska returned to teaching; between 1971 and 1973 she ran a studio at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Łódź, and from 1973 to 1992, she ran the painting and drawing studio at the Faculty of Graphic Arts of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
During this time, she began painting her Monochromes; works from this series, which she continued over the following years, were first shown in 1974 at an exhibition at the Numaga 2 Gallery in Auvernier in Switzerland. In her later series, Magical Figures, which she began in 1975, the artist returned to colour; over time, a figure – a silhouette – that was a constant presence in her painting appeared in a space suggesting a landscape.
Teresa Pągowska has won numerous awards, including the Jurzykowski Prize (1990), the Jan Cybis Prize (2000) and the Kazimierz Ostrowski Prize (2001); she was also awarded an honorary doctorate by the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk in 2002.
