Teresa Pągowska

Teresa Pągowska (1926-2007) Polish painter, lecturer, professor of fine arts
"The works of Teresa Pagowska have gained a reputation as being an unusual phenomenon in Polish contemporary art. The artist looks primarily to her dreams for inspiration. As she herself admits, "My paintings reflect my struggle with what lies beyond our normal field of observation. I dream and I look. When I paint, I do not remember (luckily) the principles of art. I am constantly searching. (...) I am most deeply taken by the human figure - not only because of the wealth of its forms. I believe that the greatest magical content resides in humans. I do not limit the life of the figures that are born in my canvasses to a single instance. At times I have the impression that I grant them a freedom of action, interested in how they might behave in a situation that is new to them." Her paintings force us to reflect on the transience of life; she interprets the drama inherent in our fate, makes a special effort at exploring the essence of contemporaneity. Teresa Pagowska's paintings are distinguishable for the poetic imagination they embody, for their simplicity of form, and the artist's unusual sensitivity for color. They reflect emotions and psychological tensions, the existential dramas of contemporary humans. They stimulate the imagination, filled as they are with deformed yet highly sensual human figures (primarily female), coastal landscapes, animals, fruit, and objects of everyday use.

 Female figures are a recurring subject in Teresa Pagowska's paintings. The artist depicts these figures in a variety of situations, placing them in sketchily rendered interiors, depicting them in an emotional manner that often borders on the intimate. In one of her exhibition catalogues, Zbigniew Taranienko wrote, "The artist has for years been studying the female body, depicting to the fullest its sensuality, eroticism, beauty, and frailty - and through this an entire range of highly variegated experiences, from the simple to the complex, sometimes so complex and intermixed that it becomes impossible to identify them unequivocally. Pagowska's nudes, dynamic close-ups of the body, of vibrating, live matter, reveal the simplest of truths. They reflect emotions and psychological states and seem to transmit reactions. This new form of the nude allows us to discover the body and matter through density and flavor, dynamism and color."(http://culture.pl/en/event/teresa-pagowska-painting)

Installation art Helen Escobedo

Helen “Elena” Escobedo (July 28, 1934 – September 16, 2010) was a Mexican sculptor and installation artist who has had work displayed all over the world from Mexico, Latin America, the United States, and Canada to the United Kingdom, Germany, as well Israel and New Zealand.
Her career as an artist spanned more than fifty years and explores ecological and urban problems through land art.Her works are site-oriented and ephemera.Escobedo was born on July 28, 1934 to a Mexican lawyer father and an English mother in Mexico City. She was educated in her home in a small neighborhood setting with her younger brother Miguel, taught by a French governess until the age of ten. At a young age, she learned ballet until she outgrew it. She was taught violin by Sander Roth, who at the time was a member of the world-famous Lener Quartet. Even though she became proficient with her violin skills, Escobedo eventually decided to switch to art
Aside from sculpture, Escobedo was a talented painter, printmaker, installation artist, writer, performance artist, lecturer, curator, and museum director in her lifetime.

Escobedo accepted the position be the head and served as director of the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Department of Museums and Galleries at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) in 1960, where she worked until 1978, organizing exhibitions.As she worked as director, she continued her craft and completed commissions as well as exhibitions of her own work. She would go on to serve as the Director of the Museum of Modern art between 1982 and 1984. From 1985 to 1989, she worked as an art curator of the Museum of the UNAM, specializing in international exhibitions. Having left her directorial role in art administration, Escobedo decided to concentrate on her own work.Escobedo competed in the UNAM sculpture competition and was awarded a prize in 1976. Entering with a small team of two other architects to design a building in 1980, they received the outstanding achievement Reaseguradora Patria for winning.
She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, Latin America & Caribbean in 1991. In 1999, she was awarded the FONCA creators’ grant.Wikipedia

Maya Deren American experimental filmmakers and photographer

Maya Deren (April 29, 1917 – October 13, 1961), born Eleanora Derenkowskaia, was one of the most important American experimental filmmakers and entrepreneurial promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer.

The function of film, Deren believed, like most art forms, was to create an experience; each one of her films would evoke new conclusions, lending her focus to be dynamic and always-evolving.] She combined her interests in dance, Haitian Vodou and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump cutting, superimposition, slow-motion and other camera techniques to her fullest advantage, Deren creates continued motion through discontinued space, while abandoning the established notions of physical space and time, with the ability to turn her vision into a stream of consciousness.

Perhaps one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema was her collaboration with Alexander Hammid on Meshes of the Afternoon (1943). She continued to make several more films of her own, including At Land (1944), A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)  – writing, producing, directing, editing, and photographing them with help from only one other person, Hella Heyman, as camerawoman. She also appeared in a few of her films but never credited herself as an actress, downplaying her roles as anonymous figures rather than iconic deities.Wikipedia

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