an artist-driven, painterly approach to the art of poster, based on ambiguity and metaphor." 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." In the period 1953–1961, Fangor designed about 100 posters. Later career and international recognition After the thaw (1958-1966) 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. It was the foundation of his subsequent artistic experiments, "where color, light, space, and a temporal perception remained fundamental aspects of pictorial expression." These ideas were reflected in Fangor's first "painting environment," an exhibition space that incorporated paintings into the surrounding environment, titled Studium przestrzeni (Study of Space) (1958) designed together with Stanisław Zamecznik at Salon Nowej Kultury in Warsaw. Emphasizing the spectator's physical experience, Fangor invited the viewer to traverse the environment between the paintings to elicit a more participatory relationship, calling this a “Positive illusory space." Unlike traditional form of painting, what Fangor described as “Renaissance hole-in-the-wall through which the spectator is compelled to look," contemporary painting according to the artist's own writings was supposed to have a direct impact on its surrounding and “radiate a force onto literal space which defines a zone of physical activity.” 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. While the exhibition was a radical experiment in incorporating painting into its surrounding space, and first such work in Polish post-war avant-garde, it was not well received by contemporary critics. Even though the cultural thaw had embraced abstraction by the late 1950s, art criticism focused on a traditional form of painting—and ways in which abstract art can counter the previously imposed Socialist Realism—rather than the kind of spatial experimentation embodied by Fangor's installation. It was not until the 1960s that Studium Przestrzeni would be recognized as a radical and influential intervention in the history of Polish post-war avant-garde. The artist later recalled that his intention to leave Eastern Europe to "confront his ideas" in the late 1950s had grown stronger as a result of the initial critical