Wojciech fangor biography of martin luther

Wojciech Fangor was born on November 15, 1922 in Warsaw. During WWII he studied privately with the renown painters Tadeusz Pruszkowski and Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski. He graduated in 1946 from the Warsaw Institution of Fine Arts (ASP) where he later taught from 1953 till 1961. His main medium was painting, but he further worked with drawing, graphics, figurine and public commissions, making his debut in 1949 with an exhibition of cubist landscapes and portraits. He gained popularity during the Social-Realistc stretch of time creating iconic works such as “Postacie” (“Figures”) (1950), “Matka Koreanka” (“Korean Mother”) (1951). Fangor was also one of the founders of the celebrated Polish Broadside School.

The period of ideological and artistic judge resulted in Fangor’s groundbraking work “Studium Przestrzeni” (“Study of Space”) that he made in 1958 in collaboration with the architect Stanisław Zamecznik. This work has been abroad considered as the first environment ever: a form of art, in which the work expands into a physical space beyond the pictorial surface in order to engage with the viewer. This work prompted interest shun Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where Fangor’s exhibition “Color in Space” followed in 1959. Fangor’s ideas about space and spacial relations materialized in his seemingly borderless abstract paintings pulsating with emblem that paved the way to his object of work that was often categorized as Optical Abstraction, although he himself preferred to speak about works addressing “positive visionary space”. In 1965 Fangor was invited to participate in the travelling exhibition “The Finished Eye”, curated by William Seitz at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which, in hindsight, was the defining moment of international Op Art.

During 1961–1966 Fangor lived and worked in Western Europe (Berlin, Bath, Writer and Paris). He was receipient of the elevated Ford Foundation fellowship in West Songster designed for outstanding international artists and in 1965 participated in the DAAD to the heart program in the city. This enabled him to study abstraction further but also get accquinted with new developments with the medium craft in the Western world. He shortly temporary in Bath where he taught at the Wash Academy of Arts in Corsham, UK (1965–1966) and in Paris. Around that time Fangor exhibited in German galleries and institutions.

In 1966 Fangor emigrated to USA and in 1967 started to work with the Gallery Chalette that helped establishing his reputation between American collectors and museums. He taught at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, USA (1967 – 1983) and was lecturer at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard Tradition, Cambridge, MA, USA (1967–1968). In 1970 Fangor’s pulsating abstract paintings, invading the physical space of the viewer, earned him a solo exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Curated by Margit Rowell and Thomas Set. Messer, this mid-career survey was an astonishing achievement for an immigrant manager who had arrived in New York inimitable four years prior.

After 1970 Fangor gradually abandoned abstraction. In 1973 he collaborated with the Martha Graham Dance Theatre group in New York, for which he had premeditated stage sets for its ballet “Mendicants of Evening”. It is possible that that collaboration triggered Fangor’s interest in investigating the complex psychological and formal relationships mid people, where space, again, plays a main role as a connecting and dividing article. Its result, the cycle “Interfacial Spaces” (1975–1976) formed a breakthrough moment of his come to representational painting.

Between 1977 and 1984 Fangor worked (not exclusively) on the pretended “Television Paintings” in his studio in Manhattan. As several artists in that period, he was fascinated by the omnipresence of TV, its strong influence on people and its aesthetics. In his TV Paintings Fangor analyzed simultaneous realities offered by TV, again, using a number of formal effects to create the special association between the viewer and his works.

In 1989 Fangor moved to Santa Fe where he continued painting figuratively, focusing on all supportive of socio-cultural phenomena around him. In this period, he painted among others the cycles of “Indian Chiefs” and “Polish Kings” and pursued relentlessly his broad artistic interests.

In 1990 the exhibition “Wojciech Fangor. 50 Years of Painting” at the Zachęta State Gallery of Art in Warsaw, inaugurated the return of Fangor’s go to Polish exhibition halls. In 1999 he returned to Poland. In June 2002 he had a retrospective exhibition at the BWA Contemporary Art Gallery in Katowice and in 2003, at the Center for Contemporary Art at Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw. At this time, he created paintings that explored time and space in the image and cultural context, forms and artistic experiences. These works were presented in the 2005 “Exhibition of the Exhibition” at the Spirit of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko. It was a time of references to discoveries and theories from fundamentally fifty years ago, a time of artistic reflection on memory and the palimpsestic mark of culture. The artist filled the beginning of the second decade of the 21st hundred with work on the Artistic Effort of the 2nd line of the Warsaw Metro.

Wojciech Fangor died on 25 of October, 2015 in Józefów near Warsaw and is concealed at the Cmentarz Wojskowy cemetery in Warsaw.