Instytut Polski w Brukseli

18.11.2023 - 14.02.2024 Arts

GNYP Gallery, in collaboration with FANGOR Foundation, will showcase the works of the Polish artist Wojciech Fangor. The show will present pieces from the artist’s estate focusing on four important phases of the artist’s oeuvre: optical abstraction, Interfaces, Television Paintings and Chairs. Fangor’s works and artistic concepts will be placed in the context of international post-war movements and shifts in which the artist participated and helped shape. Works by among others Josef Albers, Günther Uecker, Andy Warhol, Nam June-Paik, Barkley Hendriks, David Hockney will be put in a dialogue with Fangor’s paintings and drawings from different periods of his artistic practice.

NJ 18, oil on canvas, 1965	S3.900, oil on canvas, 1982
E 34, oil on canvas, 1966	Buc Wheats, oil on canvas, 1982

Wojciech Fangor in his studio, 1964

Wojciech Fangor was born in 1922 in Warsaw. His artistic education was disrupted by the Second World War, which later on pushed him into practicing socialist realism as a painter. Between 1953 and 1961 he was employed as assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. At the same time, he was also active as a designer of posters using collages, texts, drawings and photography, and became one of the founders of the Polish School of Posters. Although successful in these fields, Fangor decided to shift his attention to spatial experiments. In 1958 he constructed the first “environment” ever made, A Study of Space. These experiments gradually resulted in his abstract illusionist paintings with diffused edges of color and shape. After short stays in Vienna, Paris, Bath, London and Berlin, Fangor moved to the US in 1966, where he participated in important exhibitions such as ‘The Responsive Eye’ at MoMA in 1965, and had a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1970. After his retirement as professor of art at the Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, he returned to Poland in 1999. He continued to make art and in 2014 designed murals for the station walls of the Warsaw Underground. He died in 2015 near Warsaw.