Wojciech Fangor: Interior Exterior

The exhibition Wojciech Fangor: Interior Exterior was created in collaboration with Hotel Warszawa. In the hotel's modernist interior, we presented three monumental paintings by Fangor: Interior Exterior, Panocek 2, and Interwiev, all part of the so-called "Television Paintings" series.

Between 1977 and 1984, Wojciech Fangor created a series of so-called Television Paintings. Fascinated by the emerging visual language of mass media, he made it the subject of his painterly investigations for the years to come. Like Marshall McLuhan, who famously stated that “the medium is the message,” Fangor viewed television as a medium that shapes human perception and experience — a tool of communication and control alike.

What captivated the artist was the visual potential of the television image itself — a network of pixels generated by an electric signal. This seemingly purely physical phenomenon carries an extraordinary expressive power: it transmits information, stirs emotion, and — in doing so — manipulates. It creates the illusion of real presence, the deceptive feeling of contact with another person.

To convey the unstable, flickering nature of the screen, Fangor employed a pointillist technique inspired by the Impressionists — notably Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. By constructing compositions from overlapping planes and constellations of multicolored dots, he succeeded in generating the impression that the image invades the viewer’s space. In doing so, he highlighted the illusory, superficial, and manipulative potential of television, prompting a critical reflection on what we see on the screen. This series marked a continuation of Fangor’s long-standing inquiry into perception, space, and communication — now transposed into the context of mass media.

Against the backdrop of the Television Paintings, Interior/Exterior shifts the focus inward. Painted slightly later, this work presents a domestic scene with a small television screen embedded in the interior setting — juxtaposing personal space with the omnipresence of broadcast imagery. Fangor explores how mass media permeates the private sphere, blurring the boundaries between inner life and external reality.

Together, these three paintings offer a powerful reflection on the role of media in shaping visual culture at the dawn of the information age — a theme that remains strikingly relevant today.

Though modest in scale, this exhibition is of exceptional significance: Fangor created only 27 Television Paintings, most of which are now dispersed in private collections. The presentation of these three works in one space offers a rare opportunity to engage with a lesser-known, yet deeply important chapter of Wojciech Fangor’s legacy.