Wojciech Fangor

Wojciech Fangor (1922 – 2015) a visual artist, sculptor, co-founder of the Polish Poster School. An artist who explored the problematic aspects of spatial painting. He often shifted between styles, starting from socio-realist painting, best represented by the painting Korean Mother, which depicts a deceased woman and her son bowing over her, which is one of the most recognizable icons of anti-war manifestos in Poland. In the 1950s, he supported himself designing posters for cultural events and drawings for the Życie Warszawy newspaper. He dropped figurative art in favor of collaborations with some of Poland’s most accomplished architects and an exploration of the role of space in the realm of painting, along with ways of adding novel spatial aspects into a composition. His experiments with optical illusions were based on creating the impression that the image was coming out of itself, a technique related to the so-called sfumato technique, which is essentially based on smudging the contours of a figure. In the 1970s, Fangor returned to figurative painting, adapting it to create a critique of consumerist culture in the United States, where he’d spent over 30 years. It was the U.S. that he created the series Television Paintings, in which he put the geometric pattern of the television screen with the particular images that are broadcast upon it. He returned to Poland in 1999. Between 2007-2015 he was dedicated to creating an interior design for new stations of Warsaw’s second metro line. (Source)