Green Point Projects is pleased to announce Returning to New York: Józef Czapski and Teresa Pągowska, curated by Marek Bartelik. The show gathers together works by two of most celebrated Polish artists, Józef Czapski (1896-1993) and Teresa Pągowska (1926-2007), true painter’s painters, whose works although exhibited internationally, are little known in the United States.
The show offers an exciting dialogue with expressive figuration embraced by both artists, relying on tradition, while engaging with the main currents in art, Expressionism, “Colorism,” and New Realism in particular. The show takes place at the time, when, as the exhibition curator, Marek Bartelik notes in his essay in the exhibition catalog: “Quite unexpectedly, both artists have experienced a sort of comeback in the United States (…)”. In 2012, on the occasion of Alina Szapocznikow’s solo show at MoMA, in the exhibition catalog, Pągowska was identified (next to Szapocznikow and Magdalena Abakanowicz) to be one of the first women artists who consciously addressed as early as the early 1960s the representation of the female body in post-war Polish art. A biography devoted to Czapski’s art and life, whose work was shown in New York during Word’s Fair already back in 1938 has just been released by New York Review Books along with two other translations of his literary work; the biography presents the artist as “a towering public figure,” for whom “painting gave meaning to his life.”
Green Point Projects is located in a repurposed warehouse in an industrial part of Greenpoint close to Boiler/Pierogi and A/D/O. This is the fourth exhibition in this unique art space, which has been hosting shows of the classics of Polish artists like Magdalena Abakanowicz, Eugeniusz Markowski, Stanisław Fijałkowski, and Stefan Krygier, while also putting their work in the context of current art and life in New York.