Loading Events

Teresa Pągowska

"Shadow Self"

Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery – Ely House
February 14,2025 - April 02,2025

February 14 April 2

The first UK solo exhibition of Teresa Pągowska (1926–2007), a key figure in post-war Polish art, spanning five decades of her practice. 

Thaddaeus Ropac presents the first UK exhibition of painter Teresa Pągowska (1926–2007), spanning five decades of her practice. A key figure in post-war Polish art, Pągowska is recognised for her sensitive depictions of the female figure and her hybrid, interspecies characters. Her enigmatic compositions, while not completely abstract, reject outright representation to evoke an intimate, otherworldly dimension. Through the recurring motif of the shadow, the exhibition will trace the development of her practice from the early 1960s to the mid 2000s, featuring paintings from her major series alongside a selection of works on paper. 

Born in Warsaw, Teresa Pągowska was initially influenced by the Polish Colourists (Kapists), informing her acute sense of colour, and she later became associated with the New Figuration movement. In 1955, she participated in the pivotal All-Poland Exhibition of Young Art. Against the war—against fascism held at Warsaw’s Arsenal, which marked an important shift away from the restrictions of Socialist Realism. At this time she experimented with the Art Informel style and key works from this period were included in the historic exhibition, Fifteen Polish Painters, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1961. From the 1960s onwards she developed her own distinctive style, focused on an exploration of the female figure. 

Art critic and curator Cornelia Butler has credited the artist, along with her contemporaries Alina Szapocznikow and Magdalena Abakanowicz, as being one of the first Polish women artists to consciously address the subject of the female body, ‘working prior to a feminist language or discourse, but clearly interrogating how the integrity of the modernist body might be undone.’ Pągowska’s semi-abstract bodies – often shown fragmented or dissolving – allude to the unrepresentable experience of trauma in post-war Europe.

While the body, most frequently the female body, is at the heart of Pągowska’s oeuvre, her treatment of it is not literal. Rather than objectifying the female form, or representing it for its social role, her depictions are grounded in experience and the sensitivity of a living body. The figure is a fertile ground for discovery, deconstruction and transformation. She often integrates areas of raw, exposed canvas into her compositions, playing with variations of textures. At times, she uses negative space to invert the hierarchy between the body and its environment: figures are silhouetted against colourfully painted backgrounds to conjure imagined realms. The transmuting forms and dancing shadows which give the exhibition its title, Shadow Self, defy an imposed reality. They represent the hidden, secret or fantasised parts of ourselves. In her own words, ‘each painting depicts an experience and materialises a dream.’

More

Teresa Pągowska

About the artist

Teresa Pągowska was born in Warsaw in 1926. She studied painting under Colourist Wacław Taranczewski at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Poznán, graduating in 1951. In 1950 she moved to Sopot and became affiliated with the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, where she taught for over a decade. She participated in All-Poland Exhibition of Young Art. Against the War—Against Fascism, the landmark show held at Warsaw’s Arsenal in 1955, and the First Paris Biennale at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1959. In 1961, she was one of only two female artists selected for the group show Fifteen Polish Painters at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1964, Pągowska moved to Warsaw, where she developed her signature semi-abstract style, focussed on an embodied exploration of the female figure. In the 1970s, she taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and began painting her renowned Monochromes and Magic Figures series.  

Pągowska’s work has been shown internationally in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1961); Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (1963); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (1974); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (1989); National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. (1991); and the inaugural exhibition of Muzeum Susch in Switzerland (2019). She was recently the subject of a retrospective at the Spectra Art Space MASTERS in Warsaw (2022). Pągowska was the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the Jurzykowski Prize (1990), Jan Cybis Prize (2000), and Kazimierz Ostrowski Prize (2002). In 2002, the artist received an honorary doctorate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk.