The Game of Resistance is the 5th exhibition of the Polish artist Wojciech Fangor (1922-2015) with the GNYP gallery, organised in collaboration with the Fangor Foundation. While previous exhibitions have focused more on Fangor’s abstract works, The Game of Resistance focuses more on the artist’s earlier works in the context of post-war Poland. It concentrates on Fangor’s Socialist Realism works, archival material and his growing interest in abstraction after the Polish thaw. By presenting these paintings the GNYP gallery aims to understand his work from a broader perspective of the changing socio-political context during that time. During his life as artist, Wojciech Fangor was part of significant international movements that had profoundly changed the course of Western art history. The depth of Fangor’s art, the openness of his artistic approach and his search for the New resulted in a significant oeuvre that has kept its relevancy till today. 

Wojciech Fangor “Trial”, 1949, oil on canvas, 74 x 90 cm

Three selected areas, defined by Fangor’s specific works, are structuring this exhibition. The first area presents earlier work focussing on Social Realism. The second period focuses on the arrest and trial of Konrad Fangor, Wojciech Fangor’s father. This occurred within the post-war Polish context, where the new socialist state was consolidating power and targeting former bourgeois industrialists and entrepreneurs for “economic crimes”. The case fits that pattern of repression. During this time Wojciech Fangor starts to loose faith in the politic system. The third area focuses on the liberation and Fangor’s growing interest in abstraction and spatial experiments. Early abstract works are presented, that later manifested to Fangor’s famous optical illusion paintings with blurred and diffused edges. This led to his inclusion on the 1965 MoMa exhibition “The Responsive Eye” and his 1970 solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Wojciech Fangor “Niebieski Czarny Biały” (Blue Black White), 1957, oil on canvas, 65 x 50 cm

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, which 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.