Wojciech Fangor, M65 45/120 II

serigraphy / silkscreen on paper, 83x83 cm

The artist, who lived from 1922 to 2015, studied privately with TadeuszPruszkowski and Felicjan Kowarski during the war. In 1946 he graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. He was an avant-garde painter and graphic artist. Initially, he tried to find his own formula of socialist realism. Until 1955, he participated in the official artistic life of the People's Republic of Poland. Discouraged by Socialist Realism, he turned to posters and graphics, then sought his own artistic formula, painting pictures of simplified forms. In 1958, in Warsaw, he made a precursor to environments, a spatial composition using his paintings (the exhibition "Study of Space," together with Stanisław Zamecznik). It was then that he began to paint abstract paintings pulsating with colors, giving the impression of movement. In the early 1960s he went abroad and in 1966 settled permanently in the US, where he combined his experiments as an abstractionist with figurative painting close to hyperrealism. In 1970, he was the only Polish artist to date to have an individual exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In the 1960s and 1970s he created a series of paintings with characteristic circles and waves, producing optical effects similar to those achieved in op-art. In 2007, he designed the final decor for seven stations of the second line of the Warsaw subway.