Wojciech Fangor. Nudes, 1945-2010

About

The pluralist oeuvre of Wojciech Fangor (1922–2015) reflects many of the artistic polemics and geopolitical upheavals of the past century. His reputation primarily rests on his innovative, abstract Modernist Op-art paintings that reached full maturity in his New York period in the 1960s. But considering Fangor’s long, transatlantic life and his diverse output, there is much more to excogitate. As a young man, Fangor had the benefit of traditional artistic training. During the Second World War in his birthplace, Poland, he received private tutelage from two much-admired art professors, Tadeusz Pruszkowski and, later, Felicjan Kowarski. Fangor found he could paint and draw whatever and however he wished and, as a result, his early works are full of confident stylistic sampling. Later, he would put his shape-shifting technical ability to good use in postwar communist Warsaw. It was not until 1958 that his celebrated spatial fuzzy-edged geometric abstract work emerged. But alongside this important body of work, Fangor continued to practice and develop his visual language in other ways as well. From the mid-1970s onwards, for example, came decades of playful postmodern re-figuring, quotation, and collage. Sensitive and talented, Fangor never ceased his engagement both with emerging art ideas and art history until his last day in the studio.