Wojciech Fangor: Nudes, 1945 - 2010 - Ausstellung Berlin

Ausstellung Galerie GNYP

GNYP Gallery is pleased to present the fourth solo exhibition of the esteemed Polish artist Wojciech Fangor in Berlin.

OPENING: 30. November 2024 / 4PM - 8PM

Nudes, 1945 - 2010 will be on display from November 30, 2024 to February 28, 2025 and was mounted in close cooperation with the Fangor Foundation, which is currently completing the artist’s extensive catalogue raisonné. In the past few years, this combined activity has added to the understanding of the breadth of Fangor’s work. It has also proposed an inclusive appreciation of his experimentation across mediums and contrasting styles. 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 response. The motif of the exhibition suggests itself naturally, as Fangor drew and painted the human form continuously during his life. This was the case even while he was presenting his highly successful abstract work to exhibitions and for sale. 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. 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.

The pluralist 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. As a young man, Fangor had the benefit of traditional artistic training. During the Second World War in his birthplace, Poland, he received private tutelage from two much-admired art professors, Tadeusz Pruszkowski and, later, Felicjan Kowarski. Fangor found he could paint and draw whatever and however he wished and, as a result, his early works are full of confident stylistic sampling. Later, he would put his shape-shifting technical ability to good use in postwar communist Warsaw. It was not until 1958 that his celebrated spatial fuzzy-edged geometric abstract work emerged. But alongside this important body of work, Fangor continued to practice and develop his visual language in other ways as well. From the mid-1970s onwards, for example, came decades of playful postmodern re-figuring, quotation, and collage. Sensitive and talented, Fangor never ceased his engagement both with emerging art ideas and art history until his last day in the studio.

Fangor took part in important exhibitions such as “The Responsive Eye” at MoMA in 1965 and opened a comprehensive retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1970. His works can be found in numerous important private and institutional collections worldwide.

Excerpt from text by Dominic Eichler