This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Poland, a graduate in 1946 of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts,
and a resident of the United States between 1966 and
1999, Wojciech Fangor became a modernist artist with a highly varied
career. His work includes the creation of environments,
architectural, scenery and
poster
designs, and themes of culture embracing both America and Poland,
present and past. In the early part of his career, while in
Poland, he focused on Social Realism, then in the 1950s turned to
geometric abstraction and Op Art, especially challenged by form and
color and
the effect of his forms in space on viewers. Some of the work
from this period are small dots of electronic pixels. In the
1970s, he reverted to figurative art with faces and figures that
"generate a singular emotional space." Many of his pieces are
mass-media inspired.
Magdalena Dabrowski, American art critic and curator at New York's
Museum of Modern Art wrote of this artist: "Exploring colour, space and their manifold
relationships as his fundamental means of expression, the artist
evolved a unique visual language reflecting his artistic interests,
discoveries and innovations. His very personal approach to form and the
manner in which it was intended to affect viewers resembled much more
closely the three-dimensional perception of sculptors or architects,
than that of painters with their emphasis on the two-dimensional and
the mimetic."(Culture UP)
Fangor studied in Poland with professors Tadeusz Pruszkowski and
Felicjan Szczesny-Kowarski. He became active in Social Realist
movements in Poland and did both posters and paintings reflecting this
interest. In the second half of the 20th Century, he devoted his
expression to abstract painting, especially spatial
relationships.
In 1958, a solo exhibition of his work was held at
the Salon in Warsaw. Titled "A Study of Space", it was the first
"environment" exhibited in Poland. A reviewer described it:
"The reconstruction of his environment from 1958 is designed to remind
audiences and critics of one of the most important and most radical
artistic utterances ever to be made about modern painting, an utterance
that Polish art historians undervalue and that even seems largely to
have been forgotten."(Poland Embassy)
In 1970, he became the first Polish artist to have a solo
exhibition at
the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In 1989, Wojciech Fangor
donated one-hunded nine pieces of his work to the state of Poland, and
they were added to the Jacek Malczewski Museum in Radom. In 1999,
he returned to live in Poland, and moved to the town of Bledow
between Warsaw and Radom and created a studio in an old mill.
Sources include:
http://poland.usembassy.gov/poland/fangor.html
http://www.culture.pl/en/culture/artykuly/wy_wy_fangor_malarstwo_csw
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