Wojciech Fangor. Socmodernism

“The concept of modernity is a relative one, and its scope is subject to change,” wrote Mieczysław Porębski in 1957. It is also, we might add, a deeply political concept. In the 1950s, the question of what constitutes modern art was not a matter of formalism — it was a question of ideological orientation, values, direction, and political allegiance.

The paintings by Wojciech Fangor presented at Olszewski Gallery were created between 1948 and 1955 — a period framed by two landmark events in Polish art: the First Exhibition of Modern Art in Kraków on one end, and the Warsaw Arsenal exhibition on the other. Between the final note of the postwar avant-garde before the era of Stalinism, and the symbolic beginning of the political thaw and its version of modernity. During this same period, Fangor also painted his most well-known Socialist Realist works, Korean Mother and Figures. Although these canvases are formally distinct from the others, the central theme in Figures — the ambiguous tension between the life models offered by the two Cold War blocs — also appears in his still lifes and portraits, transformed into a question of visual language.

The portraits and still lifes from this era hover between idealisation and deconstruction, between “Western” stylisation and iconography rooted in the Eastern Bloc. Fangor seems to be searching for a compromise — when painting his wife in a Picasso-like style, the result is at times a graceful, fashion-plate three-quarter view, and at others a tightly cropped, sharply sculpted face that echoes the robust Socialist heroines of his propaganda posters. A similar tension emerges in his depictions of everyday objects. A delicately rendered mortar, straight out of a Morandi still life, appears next to a thickly contoured hand drill. The presence of drill bits, hammers, saws, and pincers among the pitchers, bowls, and kitchen bric-a-brac typical of the still life genre is no coincidence — it is a telling choice.

Borrowing its title from the vocabulary of architectural history, the exhibition offers a close look at this fascinating moment in Fangor’s career, focusing on a body of work that remains relatively little known. These paintings push beyond the binary of Socialist Realism versus modernism, revealing the artist’s search for a visual language that could reconcile avant-garde sensibilities with the political and cultural constraints of the Stalinist era.

Curated by Piotr Policht.