FRIEZE MASTERS: WOJCIECH FANGOR

SIX PAINTINGS FROM THE SIXTIES

On the occasion of Frieze Masters London 2015, The Mayor Gallery is presenting a solo exhibition of the groundbreaking Polish artist Wojciech Fangor (b. 1922, Warsaw.) After graduating in 1946 from the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, and an early period of Cubistic landscapes and Poster art, Fangor began experimenting in the early 1950’s with paint and colour to create striking chromatic effects and optical illusions.

In 1958 Fangor opened his influential exhibition A Study of Space; where the individual edgeless and vibrant abstract pictures reacted with each other to create new spatial compositions; this was the first Environment in world art. It was not until a decade later after moving to the United States in 1966, when the Light and Space movement developed in California that his work became part of an art movement exemplified by James Turrell, Bruce Nauman and Robert Irwin. Fangor, working behind the Iron Curtain without State sanction and without the new technologies available in Silicon Valley, was able to accomplish this with paint like Mark Rothko.

Wojciech Fangor was so ahead of his time that only now, five decades after his break through, is his work being recognised.

The six mesmerising works from the early 1960’s exhibited by The Mayor Gallery are from the collection of Beatrice Perry, one of the principal collector of Wojciech Fangor who identified his genius early on. She exhibited his work at her gallery in the early ‘60’s, promoted and lent his paintings to the 15 Polish Painter’s exhibition and The Responsive Eye exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965, as well as his solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1970.

Fangor lives and works in Poland.