Lusterko
Mirror

Summary/Abstract: The text reflects on the mechanisms of self-representation and the agency of the artwork in the paintings of Teresa Pągowska, focusing on two of her works. It is grounded in the assumption that the artist’s self-portraits do not merely record her personal experience but function as autonomous matrices that transform individual memory into collective experience. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s ontological theory, the author examines the ways in which figures are brought into being and pictorial space is constructed. She also explores the ambiguity of Pągowska’s representations, the disruption of conventional mechanisms of self-representation, and her departure from the mimetic depiction of reality. The underlying structure that she identifies in her artistic practice is treated as analogous to the author’s own way of painting. The interpretative framework proposed in the text leads her to argue that each successive work reinterprets the one that precedes it, and that, from an ontological perspective, the process of painting constitutes a site of continual negotiation between identity, memory, and the relationship between the image and its viewer.

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