Wojciech Fangor: Nudes, 1945-2010

The pluralistic oeuvre of Wojciech Fangor (1922–2015) reflects many of the artistic polemics and geopolitical upheavals of the past century. His reputation primarily rests on his innovative, abstract Modernist Op-art paintings that reached full maturity in his New York period in the 1960s. But considering Fangor’s long, transatlantic life and his diverse output, there is much more to excogitate.

The exhibition Wojciech Fangor Nudes, 1945–2010 is the latest in an ongoing series devoted to some of the artist’s lesser-known subjects and groups of work. It showcases a selection of rarely seen paintings and drawings that explore the naked human form with all its variety and cultural resonances. Included are works dating from Fangor’s artistic beginnings in the turbulent and difficult late 1940s, right up until the visually effervescent and experimental large-scale, partially painted collages he produced in the 21st century.

The intention of focusing on his non-canonical work is not to diminish Fangor’s significant contribution to abstraction. Instead, it is to explore his oeuvre in the spirit of the artist’s own open-mindedness. An approach that no longer needs, for instance, to be limited to notions such as the abstraction/figuration divide of the Cold War era. It also gives more attention to the radically shifting cultural-political realities the artist faced and his variegated creative responses.

The motif of the exhibition suggested itself naturally, as Fangor drew and painted the human form continuously during his life. By taking just a small section of his oeuvre as a case study, the implicit premise of “Nudes” is to consider the artist’s work as a vibrant, interwoven, contrasting, self-reflective whole. (It also draws attention to Fangor’s vulnerable, intimate side.) Instead of suggesting a heroic, linear progression with a mid-point aesthetic climax, what emerges is a thoughtful and ethical artist in a long conversation about art and society.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Fangor’s just-in-time international breakthrough came via exhibitions and sojourns in various Western European capitals and New York. Afterwards he immigrated to the US where his optical ‘illusive space’ abstraction fully flowered under the patronage of a few key dealers and curators. A 1970 solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum crowned this period. In subsequent decades, interest in the retired art professor waned for a time. But even so, he never stopped producing and in a greater stylistic multiplicity than ever before. It was only in 1999 that Fangor made his nationally celebrated return to a once again democratic, Poland.

Troublesome art that does not quite fit into received narratives, and art made in moments of transition and uncertainty when sociopolitical conditions were difficult, speaks potently to our present moment. Thus, a contemporary reading of Fangor’s eclecticism in the wake of postmodernism might allow for multiple, contradictory readings across his eventful oeuvre. We can now recognize, for example, the value of work that doesn’t follow a Modernist agenda of world-changing. The whimsical, fleeting, and playful all hold valuable ethical insights. Fangor’s nudes are bursting with such creative, anarchistic energies.”

The above text consists of excerpts taken from the catalogue essay “Figure Troubles” by the Berlin-based art writer Dominic Eichler.

The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue Wojciech Fangor, Nudes published by GNYP Gallery in collaboration with the Fangor Foundation.