The Brooklyn Rail

“I’m not a sea, women, men or animal specialist. I am me: Teresa Pągowska,” the artist said in an interview toward the end of her life, expressing her irritation with attempts to view her painting solely through the lens of codified trends and tendencies, even as art history, concerned with canonization, objectified artists, especially women. Pągowska (1926–2007) began her artistic career after World War II in Poland, which was then part of the Soviet sphere of influence. The determinism of the political and social context, Communist cultural policy, and limited opportunities for travel abroad undoubtedly shaped the course of Pągowska’s career. All the same, she turned herself into a self-made woman, venturing outside Poland whenever she could, while enlarging her interest in, and appreciation of, contemporary art. She exhibited extensively in Poland and abroad; her works can be found in many a public and private collection. In 1961, Pągowska was included in the exhibition Fifteen Polish Painters put on by MoMA.

The period in which Pągowska debuted was strongly influenced by Polish Art Informel painting which emerged during the so-called “thaw” following the Stalinist period of the mid-1950s (as distinct from French Art Informel painting of the 1940s). Polish Informel established a visual language to depict the experience of the wartime hecatomb and of a world seemingly irretrievably destroyed that would emerge anew from the chaos. It overcame, if not the trauma of the war, the trauma of Socialist Realism. As the movement became widespread, it threatened to descend into pure formalism, deadening some artists but hardly Pągowska. During her Informel period, she became virtuosic, developing her technique, control over form, and unique sense of color—the very hallmarks that would come to define her painting.

Yet Pągowska remains an artist largely unrecognized for the fullness of her achievement. (She, for instance, had her first solo exhibition in the UK only in 2025, nearly two decades after she died, at the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery no less.) Pągowska’s art, strikingly consistent, is marked by breakthroughs, and experiments which she undertook to elide categorization and to provoke public and critical reaction. Having cast off the Colorism and Art Informel influences imputed to her art, in the mid-1960s Pągowska began to speak in her own voice. Her freely imagined, abstract painterly human bodies emerge. Not the figure, but the body itself, allowing us to sense its volume and materiality. Seen as if from the outside and inside at once. Imbued with drama. Writing about Pągowska’s contemporary, the Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow, and comparing their works, critic Cornelia Butler noted that even before the emergence of feminist language and discourse, both explored ways to challenge modernist representations of the body. Specifically, the female body.

Pągowska deconstructed the female body and reinvented it in her painting, making it a central theme of her work, endowing it with integrity, independence, and psychology. The resulting paintings balance abstraction and figuration, triggering strong emotion, a sense of unease, even as the ambiguities depicted serve to draw a viewer’s attention to something that has just happened or will soon happen. Many of these paintings are also suffused with a distinctive erotic tension.

Pągowska was reluctant to comment on her work, arguing that everyone could interpret it differently, and that the effect of a painting could be surprising even to her. Faithful to the spirit of experimentation, she favored radical measures, such as the use of raw canvas as a pictorial element, which became one of the recognizable characteristics of her art. The flat, fragmented, semi-abstract bodies represented in her best-known series, “Monochromes” and “Magic Figures,” created in the 1970s, are rightly seen as part of the New Figuration movement, which restored a recognizable human presence in art. But above all, they express her desire to narrate her own evolving experience of the world, for which she developed her own language. “I myself have come to the conclusion that art cannot be created by complicating technical means, but by looking within myself, deeper and deeper. This, among other things, led me to the concept of painting directly on canvas without a primer.”

The powerful interplay between positive and negative space, the peculiar imprint—the trace of the figure—in the “Monochromes” and “Magic Figures” paintings, may also allude to the unrepresentable experience of trauma in postwar Europe.

“My painting is my painting, and its strength is my strength”, Pągowska said. Her relatively few, yet laconic, insightful statements about her own art were generally ignored by critics, who chose to imagine her as representative of one trend or another, instead of as the singular artist that she was. Nowadays, her oeuvre is being interpreted through a rich multiplicity of prisms, including feminist perspectives, environmental humanities, and affect theory. Yet the story of Teresa Pągowska is of an artist who refused to be stereotyped and whose works are informed by hard-earned wisdom.