Born in Warsaw in 1922, Wojciech Fangor was already exploring abstract painting while Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns created their first “Target Paintings”. As early as 1956, color zones began to appear in his work, defined by optical phenomena consisting of the dissolution of contours, vibrating hues, and surfaces. Unlike Noland and Jones, Wojciech Fangor uses soft and saturated oil paints, which he overlays in delicate, glazed layers. At that time, the Warsaw art scene reacted cautiously to these new, non-representational paintings. “Nobody understood or liked my abstractions; most of the people at the academy thought they were not art,” Fangor said retrospectively (quoted from: Welt Online, September 24, 2017).
In the West, the artist soon attracted attention. In particular, the pioneering publication “Studium Przestrzeni” (Study of Space), made in collaboration with the architect Stanislaw Zamecznik, sparked interest and led to the 1959 exhibition “Color in Space” at the Stedelijk Museum. Following an invitation from the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington, DC, Fangor traveled to the United States for the first time in 1962. There, he met Kenneth Noland and saw his “Target Paintings,” which resembled the compositions Fangor had painted for some time.

Three years later, a painting by Fangor was included in the legendary exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Josef Albers, who had published his famous treatise “Interaction of Color” in 1963, rightly stated that Fangor had added a new dimension to painting. For Fangor's 1970 solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Margit Rowell wrote in the introduction to the exhibition catalog: "It is worth noting that Fangor arrived at his highly personal style in isolation in Poland where he remained until 1961". This solo exhibition, the first and so far only one for a Polish artist in this venerable institution, finally put him in the limelight of the international art world.

Wojciech Fangor changed how color appears in a space by expanding the pictorial space. He achieved this primarily through his unique method of applying the paint, a method that is fundamentally different from Noland's. Instead of acrylic paints, Fangor experimented with softer and richer oil paints, creating his first intense depictions of blurred circles and swirling shapes using optical tricks and illusions as early as 1956. This shimmering aura is what makes his paintings so unique. In the present work, it is the glowing blue circle framed inside and outside by shades of gray against a white background. The infinite circle vibrates when you look at it for an extended period; depending on the focus, it moves between fore- and background. Wojciech Fangor has coined the term “Positive Illusory Space” for these representations. [EH]