Teresa Pągowska

Polish painter, university teacher, professor of fine arts (1988), from 1982 professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She belonged to the so called Sopot school of painting and was associated with the groups Réalités Nouvelles and Nouvelle École de Paris.

Portrait image

Podpis obrazka portretowego

Teresa Pągowska, 1995, photo: Erazm Ciołek/Forum

Teresa Pagowska (born 1926) graduated from the State Higher School of the Visual Arts in Poznań, obtaining her diploma in the studio of professor Wacław Taranczewski in 1951. She participated in the famous exhibition PRZECIW WOJNIE, PRZECIW FASZYZMOWI / AGAINST WAR, AGAINST FASCISM, held at Warsaw's Arsenal in 1955. This exhibition came to be known as a manifestation of rebellion against imposed Socialist Realist artistic doctrines and proved in time to be one of the first signs of the "thaw" that followed the Stalinist period.

'Szalona śpiewaczka' ('Crazy Singer'), 1988, oil, 151x130,5 cm, photo: courtesy of Galeria Atak

The artist has received a number of prestigious awards both in Poland and abroad. She was a member of the artistic groups Réalités Nouvelles and Nouvelle École de Paris, and was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Pagowska has exhibited in Paris, Venice, Florence, Edinburgh, Berlin, New York, Chicago, Helsinki, Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Sopot, Gdansk, Lublin, Bialystok, Olsztyn, and Reszel. Her paintings hang in many museums and are included in a number of private collections in Poland and beyond.

The works of Teresa Pagowska have gained a reputation as being an unusual phenomenon in Polish contemporary art. The artist looked primarily to her dreams for inspiration. As she herself admited:

My paintings reflect my struggle with what lies beyond our normal field of observation. I dream and I look. When I paint, I do not remember (luckily) the principles of art. I am constantly searching. (...) I am most deeply taken by the human figure - not only because of the wealth of its forms. I believe that the greatest magical content resides in humans. I do not limit the life of the figures that are born in my canvasses to a single instance. At times I have the impression that I grant them a freedom of action, interested in how they might behave in a situation that is new to them.

Her paintings force us to reflect on the transience of life; she interpreted the drama inherent in our fate and made a special effort at exploring the essence of contemporaneity. Teresa Pagowska's paintings are distinguishable for the poetic imagination they embody, for their simplicity of form, and the artist's unusual sensitivity for color. They reflect emotions and psychological tensions, the existential dramas of contemporary humans. They stimulate the imagination, filled as they are with deformed yet highly sensual human figures (primarily female), coastal landscapes, animals, fruit, and objects of everyday use.

Teresa Pągowska w pracowni w Warszawie, 1995, fot. Erazm Ciołek/Forum — Teresa Pągowska in her studio in Warsaw, 1995, photo: Erazm Ciołek/Forum

Female figures are a recurring subject in Teresa Pagowska's paintings. The artist depicted these figures in a variety of situations, placing them in sketchily rendered interiors, depicting them in an emotional manner that often borders on the intimate. In one of her exhibition catalogues, Zbigniew Taranienko wrote:

The artist has for years been studying the female body, depicting to the fullest its sensuality, eroticism, beauty, and frailty - and through this an entire range of highly variegated experiences, from the simple to the complex, sometimes so complex and intermixed that it becomes impossible to identify them unequivocally. Pagowska's nudes, dynamic close-ups of the body, of vibrating, live matter, reveal the simplest of truths. They reflect emotions and psychological states and seem to transmit reactions. This new form of the nude allows us to discover the body and matter through density and flavor, dynamism and color.

In 1980s, Pągowska took up religious topics. In 1983 she received the first prize in a competition for a painting of the Annunciation.

Ed. GS, February 2022

teresa pągowska

polish female painter

abstract painting