Embassy Events 2003
Wojciech Fangor Exhibit
11 September 2003 |
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Exhibition organised in co-operation with the Ministry of Culture of
the Republic of Poland, Embassy of the United States of America in
Warsaw, Embassy of the Kingdom of Norway in Warsaw
Media patrons: Gazeta Wyborcza, Polityka, WiK, The Warsaw Voice, TVN 24
Sponsors: Antalis, QPrint
Exceptional
Polish artist Wojciech Fangor, creator of the first-ever environment in
Poland (Studium przestrzeni / A Study of Space, 1958), remains the only
Pole to have had a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York
(1970). His output has been both plentiful and highly varied,
encompassing painting, the creation of environments, as well as the
design of architectural and urban projects, scenery, and posters. He
emigrated to the United States in 1966 and returned to Poland in 1999.
The
exhibition of Wojciech Fangor's art prepared by the CCA consists of
works traditionally associated with the artist and of some of his most
recent paintings, which are figural in nature. The exhibition attempts
to capture and illustrate the currents and themes that unify the
painter's explorations of the last fifty years. Fangor's most recent
works - spatial installations and oil paintings - will be shown
alongside a replica of his legendary A Study of Space, recreated
especially for this exhibition, and a selection of the artist's works
shown previously at the Guggenheim Museum. The reconstruction of his
environment from 1958 is designed to remind audiences and critics of
one of the most important andmost radical artistic utterances ever to
be made about modern painting, an utterance that Polish art historians
undervalue and that even seems largely to have been forgotten.
Since
the 1950s, Fangor has been interested in form and colour, the
functioning of paintings in space, as well as the effect of art on
viewers. His painterly installations confront viewers, surrounding and
engrossing them. The nature of Fangor's art seems most accurately
described by Magdalena Dabrowski, American art critic and curator at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York:
Exploring colour, space
and their manifold relationships as his fundamental means of
expression, the artist evolved a unique visual language reflecting his
artistic interests, discoveries and innovations. His very personal
approach to form and the manner in which it was intended to affect
viewers resembled much more closely the three-dimensional perception of
sculptors or architects,
than that of painters with their emphasis on the two-dimensional and the mimetic.
