Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, Maryland (gift from the artist)
Thence by descent to the present owner



A pioneer of Post-War abstraction and a central figure within the Op Art movement, Wojciech Fangor was an early champion of the capabilities of liminal space to inform, challenge, subvert and reinvent perceived artist conventions. Conceived at the very apex of the artist's career, M60 and M90, which date from 1968 and 1967 respectively, emerge as supreme examples of the artist's continuous fascination with how we view and depict light and space.

Fangor's practice encompassed a variety of disciplines; throughout his lengthy and celebrated career he seamlessly transitioned between the occupations of sculptor, graphic artist, architect, and, most prominently, painter. Born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1922, Fangor was classically trained at the city's Academy of Fine Arts, and, as such was subject to the considerable restrictions on aesthetic production brought on by the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Under strict Communist rule, Fangor originally adopted the prescribed canon of painting in socialist realism, focusing on figuration and setting aside his interest in Cubism, Expressionism and Impressionism. Inclusion in an exhibition in Brussels in 1956 began to broaden his horizons and in the following year he began his earliest explorations into spatial manipulation and the use of illusory effects for which he would become best known.

Fangor's inclusion in the 1961 exhibition 15 Polish Painters, held at MoMA, New York, spurred a decade of pictorial investigation, one in which the artist would seek to address the "difficult problems of reconciling the flat physical space of the art object, the virtual space of its illusion, and the real space of the viewer in a coherent aesthetic experience" (Margaret Rowell in: Margaret Rowell, Fangor, New York 1970, p. 11). The 1960s were arguably Fangor's most prolific years, and those in which Op Art would come to dominate the visual narrative of Post-War painting. These immensely fertile years culminated in Fangor's 1970 show at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the first ever solo exhibition for a Polish artist.

Following this ground-breaking Guggenheim exhibition, Fangor and his wife Magdalena purchased a remote farmhouse with vast acreage in upstate New York. Prominent architect and longtime collaborator of Fangor's, Jerzy Soltan, acquired a neighboring property shortly thereafter. The seclusion of these homes and their open spaces would prove to be liberating for Fangor, who built himself a studio and observatory on the new grounds. Together, Fangor and Soltan fully engrossed themselves in their craft, entertaining visitors and family members who spent time on the property, most notably Soltan's son, Karol, and his wife, Margaret. To commemorate their lasting friendship, Fangor gifted Soltan with a number of exceptional works, including M60 and M90, which come to market for the first time.

In the present works, pigment radiates from a central point oscillating between colours; where one shade ends and another begins remains elusive, causing their surface to almost shimmer under our gaze. A reimagining of the Renaissance technique of sfumato, Fangor rejected the use of hard lines in an attempt to depict space and light in a new and revolutionary fashion, creating works where the shapes seem to grow and morph off of the surface. Mesmerising, the works cocoon the viewer in their fluctuating colour fields, pulling us in further with each interaction. On public view for the first time in fifty years, these two paintings are prime examples of the artist's singular style that would make his works captivating, dynamic and influential even half a century after their creation.