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 along with worked with drawing, graphics, group and public commissions, making his debut in 1949 with an exhibition of cubist landscapes and portraits. He gained popularity during the Social-Realistc 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 Marker School.

The period of ideological and artistic check 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 everywhere 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 alien 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 flag that paved the way to his thing of work that was often categorized as Optical Abstraction, although he himself preferred to speak about works addressing “positive illusional space”. In 1965 Fangor was invited to participate in the travelling exhibition “The Alert 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, Author and Paris). He was receipient of the heightened Ford Foundation fellowship in West Songwriter designed for outstanding international artists and in 1965 participated in the DAAD residence program in the city. This enabled him to study abstraction further but also get accquinted with new developments with the medium picture in the Western world. He shortly ephemeral in Bath where he taught at the Tub 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 amongst 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 Doctrine, 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 Grouping. Messer, this mid-career survey was an astonishing achievement for an immigrant grandmaster who had arrived in New York solitary four years prior.

After 1970 Fangor gradually abandoned abstraction. In 1973 he collaborated with the Martha Graham Dance Spectator in New York, for which he had calculated 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 among people, where space, again, plays a main role as a connecting and dividing component. Its result, the cycle “Interfacial Spaces” (1975–1976) formed a breakthrough moment of his turn back to representational painting.

Between 1977 and 1984 Fangor worked (not exclusively) on the soi-disant “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 indefinite formal effects to create the special pleasure between the viewer and his works.

In 1989 Fangor moved to Santa Fe where he continued painting figuratively, focusing on all amiable 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 business 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 Interior of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko. It was a time of references to discoveries and theories from about fifty years ago, a time of artistic reflection on memory and the palimpsestic gut feeling of culture. The artist filled the beginning of the second decade of the 21st 100 with work on the Artistic Enterprise of the 2nd line of the Warsaw Metro.

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