The Most Famous
SCULPTORS from Poland
This page contains a list of the greatest Polish Sculptors. The pantheon dataset contains 258 Sculptors, 4 of which were born in Poland. This makes Poland the birth place of the 13th most number of Sculptors behind Switzerland, and Sweden.
Top 5
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Polish Sculptors of all time. This list of famous Polish Sculptors is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.
1. Józef Gosławski (1908 - 1963)
With an HPI of 61.95, Józef Gosławski is the most famous Polish Sculptor. His biography has been translated into 55 different languages on wikipedia.
Józef Jan Gosławski (24 April 1908 – 23 January 1963) was a Polish sculptor and medallic artist. He was a designer of coins (e.g. 5 zł with fisherman), monuments (e.g. Frédéric Chopin in Żelazowa Wola) and medals (e.g. Year 1939). Laureate of many artistic competitions; decorated with the Silver Cross of Merit.
2. Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930 - 2017)
With an HPI of 61.53, Magdalena Abakanowicz is the 2nd most famous Polish Sculptor. Her biography has been translated into 41 different languages.
Magdalena Abakanowicz (Polish pronunciation: [maɡdaˈlɛna abakaˈnɔvit͡ʂ]; 20 June 1930 – 20 April 2017) was a Polish sculptor and fiber artist. Known for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium and for outdoor installations, Abakanowicz has been considered among the most influential Polish artists of the postwar era. She worked as a professor of studio art at the University of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland, from 1965 to 1990, and as a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles in 1984. She was born to a noble landowning family in Falenty, near Warsaw, before the outbreak of World War II. Her formative years were marred by the Nazi occupation of Poland, during which her family became part of the Polish resistance. After the war, under the imposed communist rule, Abakanowicz attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Sopot and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw between 1950 and 1954, navigating a conservative educational environment marked by the imposition of Soviet-dictated restrictive and propagandistic doctrine of Socialist Realism. The Polish October and subsequent political and cultural thaw in 1956 marked a significant turning point in Abakanowicz's career. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Abakanowicz's work began to take on more structure and geometric form, influenced in part by Constructivism. Her one-person exhibit at the Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw in 1960 signaled her emergence in the Polish textile and fiber design movement. She received first international recognition following her participation in the first Biennale Internationale de le Tapisserie in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1962. Abakanowicz's most celebrated works emerged in the 1960s with her creation of three-dimensional fiber works called Abakans. During the 1970s and 1980s, she transitioned to creating humanoid sculptures. These works reflected the anonymity and confusion of the individual amidst the human mass, a theme influenced by her life under a Communist regime. Some of her prominent international public artworks include Agora in Chicago and Birds of Knowledge of Good and Evil in Milwaukee.
3. Andreas Schlüter (1660 - 1714)
With an HPI of 58.99, Andreas Schlüter is the 3rd most famous Polish Sculptor. His biography has been translated into 25 different languages.
Andreas Schlüter (1659 – c. June 1714) was a German baroque sculptor and architect, active in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Russian Tsardom.
4. Alina Szapocznikow (1926 - 1973)
With an HPI of 50.40, Alina Szapocznikow is the 4th most famous Polish Sculptor. Her biography has been translated into 20 different languages.
Alina Szapocznikow (Polish: [ʂapɔt͡ʂˈɲikɔf]; May 16, 1926 – March 2, 1973) was a Polish artist and Holocaust survivor. Recognized as one of the most important Polish sculptors of the post-war era,: 49 : 39 Szapocznikow utilized diverse and experimental mediums to investigate and examine the human form, recalling genres such as surrealism, nouveau realism, and pop art. Born in 1926 in Kalisz, Poland, into a Jewish family, she grew up in Pabianice near Łódź. Her childhood was disrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Szapocznikow was later imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen before being transferred to Terezin in 1943. After the end of the war in 1945, Szapocznikow moved to Prague, where she began her formal training in sculpture. Her education continued at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, under Paul Niclausse. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, she moved between Prague and Paris, and later became ill with peritoneal tuberculosis. In 1952, Szapocznikow married Polish art historian Ryszard Stanisławski, but the marriage ended in 1958. She participated in numerous competitions for public monuments conforming to the doctrine of Socialist Realism in Soviet-aligned Poland. After the Khrushchev Thaw, Szapocznikow returned to avant-garde works, focusing on the subject of her own body, a theme that would remain central to her work throughout the rest of her artistic career. In 1962, she was offered a solo show at the Venice Biennale and moved to Paris in 1963, where she became friends with Pierre Restany and experimented with innovative materials and techniques in sculpture. Szapocznikow died in March 1973 of bone cancer. After the fall of communism in Poland, her work gained recognition domestically and abroad, including a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2013.
5. Jan de Weryha-Wysoczański (b. 1950)
With an HPI of 42.91, Jan de Weryha-Wysoczański is the 5th most famous Polish Sculptor. His biography has been translated into 15 different languages.
Jan Michał, 6th Chevalier de Weryha-Wysoczański-Pietrusiewicz (born 1 October 1950), known as Jan de Weryha-Wysoczański, is a Polish sculptor, process artist and concrete artist. He was born in Gdańsk. From 1971 to 1976 he studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. Since 1981, he has been living and working in Hamburg. In 1998, he won the 1st prize, the Prix du Jury, awarded by the Ministry of Culture of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg at the 'Salon de Printemps 98', Luxembourg. In 1999, he created a monument in memory of the deportees of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising for the memorial to the victims of the Neuengamme Nazi concentration camp at Hamburg, in 2012 a memorial for the Nazi forced labourers in Hamburg-Bergedorf. He was represented by Galerie Kellermann in Düsseldorf. In 2022 de Weryha-Wysoczański was awarded in Vienna the Golden Owl culture award in the category Visual Arts. He comes from an old noble family of Walachian boyar stock and legend has it that his coat of arms is borne by the descendants of Attila the Hun. His only son Rafael is a writer, his uncle Basil was a rich 19th century philanthropist. A son of his aunt Anna was composer Yaroslav Yaroslavenko. Another cousin was industrialist, novelist and playwright Bronislas, 3rd Chevalier de Minkowicz-Wysoczański.
People
Pantheon has 5 people classified as Polish sculptors born between 1660 and 1950. Of these 5, 1 (20.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Polish sculptors include Jan de Weryha-Wysoczański. The most famous deceased Polish sculptors include Józef Gosławski, Magdalena Abakanowicz, and Andreas Schlüter. As of April 2024, 1 new Polish sculptors have been added to Pantheon including Jan de Weryha-Wysoczański.
Living Polish Sculptors
Go to all RankingsDeceased Polish Sculptors
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Józef Gosławski
1908 - 1963
HPI: 61.95
Magdalena Abakanowicz
1930 - 2017
HPI: 61.53
Andreas Schlüter
1660 - 1714
HPI: 58.99
Alina Szapocznikow
1926 - 1973
HPI: 50.40
Newly Added Polish Sculptors (2024)
Go to all RankingsOverlapping Lives
Which Sculptors were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 3 most globally memorable Sculptors since 1700.
