Wojciech Fangor (1922-2015), Circle of Blue, 1975

Provenance
Germany, private collection purchase at DESA Gallery (1990)

The presented work, made in pastel technique on paper, dates from 1975. In the mid-1970s, after the great success of his solo exhibition at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Fangor began to move slowly away from the op-art search for space that had characterized his work since the late 1950s. Alongside his oil compositions, drawings formed an important part of the artist's oeuvre; they were natural to the creative process of exploration and rehearsal, an important stage of it, but also the moment when the final painting composition crystallized. Many of them bear the characteristics of an autonomous, fully completed composition, as evidenced not only by the meticulousness of the elaboration, but also by their large format. The drawn op-art compositions, which were created in parallel with Fangor's best canvases, provide an insight into the creative process, especially the purely plastic one. Completely different from the final oil paintings, where the composition is created from colors almost diffusely permeating each other and imperceptibly merging into an illusion of shape, in Fangor's drawings we see this process broken down into distinct parts. The offered work with the blue circle in its simplicity shows the beauty and elegance of the coordinated colored lines. Hundreds of individual lines and touches in specific colors, groups of which overlap in waves and only from a distance, confusing the eye, give the illusion of the formation of derivative colors and shapes, achieving a mature effect analogous to the artist's oil paintings.