Teresa Pągowska

“She worked nearly every day. Painting was her raison d’être, so when she couldn’t create, she became unhappy, missing that expulsion of energy that she had within her,” Filip says of his mother. Teresa Pągowska’s work is classified as part of the New Figuration movement, where animals, people, and objects are portrayed through blots of color that hover on the border between abstraction and figuration. Deformed silhouettes of women, anonymous bodies deprived of details, appear in her paintings in dynamic, dance-like poses. She built a sense of intimacy into her scenes, giving the viewer the impression of peeping at the oblivious figures. She often painted her women, who were sunbathers, acrobats, lovers caught mid-act, or simply sitting figures, in the company of animals, backgrounded by a landscape.

She often said that creating was for her a constant search for something new and unknown. “She was interested in art and its history, and she knew what was going on in the world, but she had her own dimension, and quickly became her own self. She chose her path and did not stand still, evolving in her own world,” says her son, adding that she always impressed him with her independence. What also stands out in Pągowska’s work is her restraint in form and color, an absence that gives her pieces even more power of expression. The unprimed canvas introduces a painterly quality, and white, the artist’s favorite color, creates the impression of a photo negative.

Re-enchantment

Pągowska fascinates to this day not only in Poland. “Re-enchantment,” an ongoing group exhibit in the renowned Parisian gallery Thaddaeus Ropac features ten artists, nine of them women, whose art practices explore re-enchantment with the world as a response to the disenchantment of the 20th century. Pągowska’s work, shown among contemporary artists, is the axis of the show.

Curator Oona Doyle, inspired by the words of feminist academic and activist Silvia Federici, explores in the show attempts to re-instill a sense of mystery into a world that has been demystified by the hyper-rational modern era. She notes that Pągowska’s gaze is directed at a woman’s selfhood. Pągowska paints her figures in anxious, erotic, and shy poses, a deep, complex array that is refreshing in an art world historically dominated by the objectifying male gaze. Importantly, in addition to painting women, Pągowska liked to paint landscapes and animals. “She is an artist who foreshadows trends, one who is sensitive toward nature and her surroundings, a lover of animals, who often accompany and fuse with the human form on her canvases,” Doyle says.

She also points out that Pągowska’s technique of painting her figures in the negative reverses our anthropocentric way of looking at the world. Doyle cites Federici’s notion of “re-enchanting the world” as a reconstructing of our lives around building community with the natural world. The dreamlike, magical quality of Pągowska’s work tries to do that kind of re-enchanting, which today, at a time of constant crisis and war, takes on a newly powerful dimension.

The big wide world

She was born in 1926 in Warsaw. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Pągowska was only four years old. Little Teresa and her older by three years brother bounced between various country homes of friends and acquaintances across Poland. In those first years, their father had to work to support the family and didn’t have time to take care of the children. He was a farmer, and in the early 1930s he decided to move with them to the city of Poznań, because the surrounding Wielkopolska region was at the time the most agriculturally developed area of the country. This is where Teresa went to school and spent the wartime 1940s. It’s where she took drawing classes and later studied painting and mural techniques at the local fine arts academy.

In the 1950s, she became involved in the art circles of the Polish seaside town of Sopot. Along with her first husband, painter Stanisław Teisseyre, and his team, she participated in the post-war rebuilding of the nearby city of Gdańsk’s historical Old Town. To this day you can see Pągowska’s mural work on the facades of the townhomes of the Długi Park square. She quickly climbed the ladder of a teaching career. She started as a teaching assistant for renowned painter and set designer Piotr Potworowski at what is known today as Gdańsk’s Academy of Fine Arts, after which she taught in Łódź. In 1972 she was offered a position running her own teaching studio in the Graphic Arts department of Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts.

While living in Sopot, she met Henryk Tomaszewski, a prominent graphic artist, illustrator, and creator of the Polish School of Posters, and it was for him that she eventually decided to return to Warsaw. Filip was born while they were still living in Sopot. Teresa and Henryk got married several years later, after which the family went on a roadtrip around Europe in a Volkswagen Beetle. “I was seven years old. It took us three months to drive through Czechoslovakia, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and France. I remember how in Paris we met my parents’ friends – Konwicki, Hłasko, Cieślewicz [renowned Polish figures, respectively: Tadeusz, writer and film director; Marek, author and screenwriter; Roman, graphic artist and photographer]. I understood even then that the big wide world was opening in front of me, while my childhood was coming to a close,” Filip recalls.

“Specific weight”

Teresa Pągowska is an artist who, at a time when the art world was deeply patriarchal, was treated as an equal to men. “She was lucky that very quickly she started being seen as a serious artist. She commanded respect among other artists, because they knew she had ‘specific weight’ and that she couldn’t be ignored,” says Filip. This was in large part due to her tenure as Potworowski’s teaching assistant. “He was a curious, open person. He lived in the UK for many years. Meeting him early on in her career gave my mom a lot of creative energy. It established her in her worldview, in her belief that she could go far. She always had a good relationship with him, she never felt that he condescended to her or treated her differently because of her gender. They were close enough for him to become my godfather.”

Even during the communist era she wasn’t afraid to take her art outside the borders of Poland, thanks to which in 1961 she was one of the two women invited to take part in “Fifteen Polish Painters,” an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She started learning French as a child, so a lot of her work was geared toward France and francophone Switzerland. She eventually also learned Italian. “She never felt like she was far away from the wider world. She’d travel to Italy, where well-known artists eagerly invited their Polish peers. In Paris, she had group and individual exhibits, and in a small mountain town in francophone Switzerland there remains to this day a gallery called Numaga, with which she was associated for twenty years,” Pągowski says. “My parents would take me there sometimes. It was a completely different world, starting with the fact that a Swiss village butcher had an art collection, and in it was my mother’s work.”

Foreign collaborations paid off with global recognizability. The art world appreciated her work during her lifetime, and today her pieces reach sky-high prices and are part of the most important public and private collections.

The interest in her work is unflagging: a “Masters” series exhibition at Warsaw’s Starak Art Space in 2022 that reminded audiences about her and her art drew large crowds. “My mom always thought that paintings should be sold, that they should be out in the world. She said she doesn’t paint for her work to be in stored in some corner, but to have it be in good collections, and to please audiences,” says Filip, who along with curator Agnieszka Szewczyk has for the last six years been organizing the artist’s exhibitions and serving as keeper of Pągowska’s work and the family archive.

Up until 1976, Teresa, Henryk, and Filip lived in the legendary Wedel townhouse on the corner of Szpitalna and Górskiego Streets in Warsaw. “My mom didn’t have her own studio, so she’d always be painting in the fairly large living room. But when guests came over, she had to clean up all her work, her easels and tools. At that time they were building single-family houses in the Mokotów neighborhood, and thanks to someone backing out of a purchase, my parents were able to buy one – finally giving them both their own spaces to work,” recalls Filip, who four years later left for New York, where he stayed for 30 years. Several years prior, he decided to study Graphic Arts at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, which isn’t easy when both your parents are renowned professors at the school. As he admits himself, leaving Poland was also an escape, an attempt at becoming independent, and a way to find his own artistic path.

He succeeded. Known as one of the most prominent Polish graphic artists, for the last 25 years he has worked with the fashion brand Comme des Garçons, for which he created, among others, the PLAY line’s iconic heart logo. He also designed the visuals for Drake’s “Summer Sixteen” concert tour, and for a number of his albums. For many years, his illustrations appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Le Monde. After the death of his parents (Henryk in 2005 and Teresa in 2007), he came back to the family home and now works in his mother’s studio. “It’s a bit bigger and has better lighting than my dad’s old studio, which is where I now have my bedroom and library,” he says.

Showcasing Teresa Pągowska’s paintings in her beloved Paris, in a globally renowned gallery is an exciting moment for Filip. “I was thinking about what my mom would say about the show, and I am convinced that she’d be very happy.”

“Re-enchantment” was on view at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Paris until May 11th 2024.

A forthcoming exhibition of Teresa Pągowska opens on Thursday, 13 February 2025, at Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery in London.

‘Shadow Self’ is the first UK exhibition of Pągowska. 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.