Teresa Pągowska. Shadow Self

About

Thaddaeus Ropac London is pleased to present Shadow Self, the first UK solo exhibition of painter Teresa Pągowska (b. Warsaw, 1926–2007), spanning five decades of her practice. A key figure in postwar Polish art, Pągowska is recognised for her sensitive depictions of the female figure and her innovative use of pure canvas as a pictorial element of her paintings. While not completely abstract, Pągowska’s figures – often shown dissolving or metamorphosing in space – mark a transition from the machine-like modernist body that prevailed before the Second World War towards an intimately felt, emancipated representation. Through the recurring motif of the shadow, the exhibition will trace the development of Pągowska’s practice from the early 1960s to the mid-2000s, featuring paintings from her major series, alongside a selection of works on paper.

Teresa Pągowska’s acute sense of colour was initially influenced by the Colourists (Kapists), a group of Polish painters active in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, who were inspired by Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne and Pierre Bonnard. In 1955, she participated in the landmark All-Poland Exhibition of Young Art. Against the war—against fascism held at Warsaw’s Arsenal, which marked an important shift from the restrictive aesthetic principles of Socialist Realism. During the 1960s, Pągowska experimented with the abstract, improvisational tendencies of Art Informel, as well as the expressive pictorial language later associated with the New Figuration movement to develop her signature style and an expanded approach to the human form. In 1961, she was one of only two women artists selected for the exhibition Fifteen Polish Painters at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Peter Selz, the curator of this historic show, identified a distinctly personal and experiential quality in Pągowska’s painting: ‘Her abstractions seem to find their origins in the experience of nature, not as it is observed from a distance with a horizon, but experienced intimately.’