Wojciech Fangor is one of the most recognisable Polish artists working in the 20th century. His artistic path abounds in several fascinating turns. Fangor's works found their place in the canon of socialist realist art, and his 1958 study of space, prepared together with Stanisław Zamecznik, was a precursor to similar activities in world art. The author is permanently inscribed in the history of Polish poster art, being one of the main figures of the so-called Polish poster school. However, it was a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1970, which in itself testified to the position he had gained in New York art, that cemented his role as one of the precursors of op-art. However, he became interested in the jittery and dynamic compositions leading up to op art earlier, as early as the early 1960s. In 1965, he was invited to participate in one of the most important exhibitions of this direction, 'The Responsive Eye', held at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and curated by William C. Seitz. Two other artists with links to Poland, Julian Stanczak and Richard Anuszkiewicz, also participated in this exhibition. Visited by over 180,000 people, the exhibition was a great success and is considered the beginning of American op-art.

Fangor's artistic debut was an exhibition in 1949, where, at the dawn of Socialist Realism, he showed painting with a distinctly Cubist influence. However, Socialist Realism turned his art onto other tracks. Among the works from this period, a special place is occupied by 'Mother Korean' and 'Figures', which are not only some of the best works of the period, but are also questionable by their ambiguous contexts, which seem to grow in the self-ironic painting from 1953, showing the Palace of Culture and Science being carried in, which at first glance appears inverted. Moving away from Socialist Realism, he sought - like many others - a safe space in the poster. His poster for René Clément's 1952 film The Walls of Malapaga brought him an award at the National Poster Exhibition.

In 1958, together with Stanisław Zamecznik, they prepared the spatial installation 'Study of Space' in the now-defunct salon of 'Nowa Kultura', discovering how dispersed backgrounds allow the construction of a dynamic image space. In the end, the artists did not treat them as independent compositions, but proposed a kind of environment. Twenty canvases arranged in the room created complex spatial relationships, creating a kind of open-ended work. The artists showed another exhibition devoted to the study of space at the Stedelijk Museum in 1959.

In 1961, Wojciech Fangor decided to leave Poland. Initially to Vienna, and from there to the USA in 1962 as a scholarship holder at The Institute of Contemporary Arts. He then briefly returned to Europe, in connection with receiving a Ford scholarship in West Berlin. He then spent a year at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, England. Eventually, however, he moved to the USA in 1966. He taught at, among others, Farleigh Dickinson University in Madison, N.J. (1966-1983) and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1967-1968). Although it was his op-art paintings that brought him his greatest fame, the mid-1970s saw another turn in his work. The artist turned to so-called television paintings, which he painted until around 1984. Abstraction was replaced by figuration, or rather a variety of images of contemporary culture, including television. He was primarily interested in the media structure of the image, but also in its wider cultural context. He seems to approach it critically, although not without fascination, but one that analyses the medium, sensing its banality.

The artist stayed in the USA until 1999, when he decided to return to Poland. He then settled near Warsaw. In 2014, a year before his death, he designed a series of murals for the Warsaw underground.

His paintings are in many museum collections and private collections around the world, including: "Mf" from 1969 at El Museo del Barrio, "Number 17" at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York (the painting was shown in the exhibition "The Responsive Eye" in 1965.), 'Untitled' also at MoMA, 'M63' at the Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) in San Francisco, 'M5-1969' at the Carnegie Art Museum in Pittsburgh, 'M 48' at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and 'M39' at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago.