A sculpture by Igor Mitoraj in the Valley of the Temples Agrigento Sicily

Igor Mitoraj was born in Oederan in 1944 to Polish parents. He commenced his artistic studies at the Cracow School of Art and then became a student of Tadeusz Kantor at the Academy of Fine Arts. He exhibited his work for the first time in 1967 at the Krystofory Gallery in Cracow, and then, on the advice of Kantor, left Poland to pursue his own expressive goals in greater freedom. Mitoraj left for Paris and briefly studied at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, where he was greatly accepted into the artistic milieu during the tumultuous student unrest of 1968. Widely traveled, Mitoraj absorbed the influences of sculptural technique from Greece, New York, Central America, and Italy.