In 1966, following a period of extensive international travel, Fangor relocated to the United States where he achieved a level of commercial success, critical reception, and direct exposure to American post-war visual culture largely inaccessible to most contemporary artists from the Eastern Bloc.

His father, Konrad Fangor, an engineer, has been described as a "wealthy prewar entrepreneur",[4] and a founder of Technical Society for Trade and Industry in Warsaw, while his mother, Wanda née Chachlowska, was a trained pianist.

[5] The new cultural doctrine of Socialist Realism, which imposed naturalistic visual vocabularies and mandated that artists focus on themes relating to everyday life under socialism, was officially introduced in 1949.

[7][Note 1] The former was praised by state-controlled press for its poignant criticism of the Korean War and for challenging what the Soviet Union propaganda defined as colonialist and imperialist ambitions of the United States.

[5] Even though Fangor had been intrigued by the idea of collective artistic action as a means of rebuilding Poland in the aftermath of World War II, he had eventually become disenchanted with Socialist Realism which he saw as an ineffective tool of enacting social or political change.

"[13] In his design for Andrzej Wajda's acclaimed Ashes and Diamonds from 1958, for instance, Fangor incorporated "handwritten text, framed though as a painting, in a three-colour palette scheme" to render "the complexities of the film.

[2] By 1958, Fangor had begun developing his distinct visual idiom that incorporated and combined large areas of blurred in a variety of quasi-geometrical, abstract forms, initially painted in black and white.

[16] Fangor's installation, shown to the public six years prior to Robert Morris's breakthrough Minimalist exhibition at New York's Green Gallery, would become one of the earliest studies of phenomenological properties of abstract art in post-war Europe.

[19] The following year, several of Fangor's abstract paintings were included in a group exhibition organized at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, providing the artist with a chance to showcase his recent work outside of the Iron Curtain.

Crucial to Fangor's subsequent exposure to the West was his encounter with Beatrice G. Perry, the co-founder of Gres Gallery in Washington, D.C., who represented Yayoi Kusama and Fernando Botero, among other international contemporary artists.

[15] Perry, along with her business partner Thomas Baker Slick, became an important patron of Fangor in the United States and helped promote his work among American collectors and curators.

[15]Curated by Peter Selz, who had traveled to Poland in 1960 and 1961 to select paintings for the exhibition, Fifteen Polish Painters included works by Wojciech Fangor, Henryk Stażewski, Stefan Gierowski, Aleksander Kobzdej, Tadeusz Kantor, and Jerzy Nowosielski, among others.

[26] Fangor designed a series of abstract wall and ceiling mosaics that recalled the artist's investigations into the immersive properties of color in painting and its impact on the spectator.

The shifting hues of mosaics set a visual rhythm and were meant to seamlessly integrate five colors (red, orange, yellow, blue, and green) into the station's architectural interior.

[23] Rothko's Abstract expressionist works consisting of large swaths of color are said to have made an impact on Fangor, even though he had not shared the former artist's interest in the emotional and spiritual qualities of painting.

In February 1964, he had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Lambert in Paris and in June that year, he held an individual show at Städtisches Museum Schloss Morsbroich in Leverkusen, Germany.

In 2021, for instance, critic and art historian Karen Wilkin described one of his paintings as "a blurred version of a Noland Circle," alluding to the visual similarities between Fangor's style and that of artists associated with the color field movement.

[1] In a review for the New York Times, critic John Canaday found some parallels between Fangor's organic shapes and Jean Arp's biomorphic forms of the Surrealist period and compared his technique to that of Color field painters.

[35] Utilizing vibrant and highly contrasting colors, each mural spelled out the name of the corresponding station with large-scale lettering, reflecting Fangor's earlier engagement with graphic design and typography.

Moreover, the Warsaw Metro murals represented the artist's return to using color as a means of conditioning the surrounding environment and eliciting participatory reaction from the spectator, similarly to the mosaics Fangor designed in the early 1960s for Śródmieście PKP station.