The psychologically-charged paintings of Teresa Pągowska Contemporary Art Society's Friday Dispatch . (This link opens in a new tab).
By Lydia Figes
“A painting may arise from a dream. The most important dreams cannot be revealed; it is to me that they present themselves. They will leave their marks on paintings” once reflected the Polish artist Teresa Pągowska in 2001. A significant figure in her native Poland, Pągowska has belatedly made her UK debut in the show Teresa Pągowska: Shadow Self at Thaddaeus Ropac, London – nearly two decades after her death. Curated by Oona Doyle, a long-time admirer of Pągowska’s work, the exhibition assembles work from the 1960s until the mid-2000s. Existing tentatively between figurative and abstract painting, the oil paintings and collaged works on paper are displayed in the elegant corridors and upstairs galleries of the light-filled, 18th-century Mayfair townhouse, revealing the recurring motif of the shadow.
Born in Warsaw in 1926, Pągowska was raised by a well-to-do family who moved to the city of Poznan after her mother, Helena, died in 1930. Pągowska was thirteen years old when the Second World War broke out and Hitler invaded Poland. Subsequently, she witnessed the fall of her city to the Nazis – less than two weeks after the start of the conflict. Under German occupation, the western region of Poland was forced to adopt German as the official language, schools closed and teenagers were forced to work, meaning Pągowska spent much of the war doing manual labour in the city gardens. According to her grandson, Filip, she later joined youth units of the underground resistance movement, known as the Grey Ranks. In 1978, she created the work Hommage au Ghetto de Varsovie (1978), which she dedicated to Marek Edelman – the Jewish leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, one of the most significant acts of resistance during the war, which resulted in the complete destruction of the capital’s Jewish ghetto. In an attempt to flee Poland, Pągoswka’s older brother Wiktor was caught by the Gestapo when attempting to cross the border. He was sent to Auschwitz, where he eventually died at the age of 23 in 1944. By February 1945, Poznan was liberated by the Soviets, after heavy fighting between the Germans and the approaching Red Army. According to Filip, Pągowska rarely spoke about the atrocities of the war, but the horrors of that time had an immense impact on her early years and remained a painful memory throughout her life.
After the war, Pągowska turned to art. She received a diploma in painting from the Poznan Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied under artist Waclaw Taranczewski, who had been influenced by avant-garde European movements. Pągowska then moved to Warsaw, where she eventually took up a teaching position at the Academy of Fine Arts, earning the title of professor in 1988. As the decades progressed, she continued to experiment with form, colour and most notably – the female form as a subject matter. In early works such as Untitled, 1966, a canvas of deep blues points to the possible influence of colour field painters of American Abstract Expressionism, while the fragmented yet faceless figure in the centre alludes to the tormented physicality of Francis Bacon’s subjects. Whispers of Bacon can also be detected in the composition of Kapiel (Bath), 1974, in which a distorted, corpulent figure – in hues of white, grey and black – stands in a brightly-lit, white-tiled bathroom. Behind, a dramatic shadow creates a sense of depth and suspense. The claustrophobia of the image is palpable and disquieting.
