Artists

Teresa Pągowska, Martyna Pinkowska

Press release

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. (…)  I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.” Sylvia Plath, “The Bell Jar” The subjects of Martyna Pinkowska’s latest paintings are women and interiors. Ordinary domestic spaces filled with dishes, cutlery, chairs, tables, and flowers–and amidst them, the anonymous figure of a woman absorbed in daily chores. Her world is steeped in muted, earthy tones. Her long, slightly awkward body haunts successive rooms like a ghost. She is constantly occupied: tidying, rearranging, organising. She fills her time with an endless series of small tasks, as if her life depended on it. And indeed, it does–though not in the way she had planned. Driven by a desire for self-development, she takes on new activities and tasks. The mantra “Intelligent people do not get bored” echoing inside her head. She built her entire life around it, yet instead of reaching for the ripe figs of fate, she allows them to shrivel and fall to the ground under the weight of the safe and mundane. Yet, rather than bringing solace, this repetition gradually blurs the boundary between the protagonist and the space surrounding her. She adopts the shapes, textures, and stark, geometric rhythms of the interior, as if, over time, she were becoming an organic part of the house itself. Displayed alongside Martyna’s canvases are paper collages by Teresa Pągowska, made in 1993. Pągowska once wrote of her painting: “I do not reduce the life of the characters emerging on my canvases to a one-time existence.” The silhouettes in these collages are constructed from the faded, well-worn stencils she used while painting–the very same forms that previously served as models for many different female figures in her paintings. Cut from washed-out, crumpled packing paper, they bear the traces of past ink, charcoal, and creases. Stripped of props and narrative context, and suspended against stark, light backgrounds, they are no longer tethered to a single story or identity. Pągowska fixes them in precisely this state of potentiality. Each figure multiplies and overlaps with itself, remaining a composite of past, present, and possible versions. Their various facets separate, coexist, and interpenetrate–broken only by the accent of red fingernails or a bright stripe–refusing to yield to the pressure of settling on a single, definitive form. Both Pinkowska and Pągowska explore the temporality of existence and the instability inherent in the experience of being. Their anonymous figures emerge from the artists’ intimate inner worlds, yet remain open enough to become archetypes. In gazing at them, we don’t encounter a portrait of another person, but our own potentiality.