2024-04-16
Wojciech Fangor (1922-2015) went down in the history of art as a versatile artist, an exhibition at Toruń's Centre for Contemporary Art illustrates this perfectly. Visitors can see a wide cross-section of the artist's oeuvre, from his famous op-art paintings through sculptures and artistic posters to visualized mosaics. The event will run until the fourth of September this year.
In the spacious halls of the second floor of the CSW, visitors will be able to see both faces of Wojciech Fangor: the mystic (op-art paintings) and the down-to-earth man (artistic poster, visualization of mosaics decorating the Warszawa Śródmieście railway station). In addition to these, art lovers will see at the exhibition, among others, 130 drawings by Fangor, book art and films about the artist. A portrait of Nicolaus Copernicus, on loan from the Museum of that astronomer in Frombork, is a very successful accent, fitting in with the history of Toruń.
The exhibition at the CSW in Toruń was specially planned for the year of the artist's hundredth birthday. Moreover, it is intended to correspond with an exhibition of works by Sean Scully. The curators wanted to show two faces of abstraction in contemporary art in one building: Scull's geometric abstraction and Wojciech Fangor's op-art. The exhibition was realized courtesy of museums, institutions, galleries and private collectors.
Graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1946. In the early 1950s he created figurative works in the aesthetics of socialist realism but abandoned this trend in favour of abstraction and optical art. He lived in Germany, England and the USA. In 1970, the Guggenheim Museum in New York organized his solo exhibition. Fangor is the author of the decoration of several stations of the Warsaw metro. He has received many prestigious awards, including the Jan Cybis Award (2014), and his works are in collections around the world.