Igor Mitoraj was born in 1944 in Oederan, Germany. He was the son of a deported Polish forced laborer and a French prisoner of war, an officer in the Foreign Legion. After the end of the war, he came with his mother to visit her parents in Poland. He spent his childhood and youth in the village of Grojec.
He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Cracow, including under Tadeusz Kantor (1967- 68). For the next two years he continued his studies at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux- Arts in Paris. From 1968, he created in France and Italy. In the mid-1970s he devoted himself to sculpture, creating intimate heads and torsos in distinctive scrolls and bandages. He presented them at his first solo exhibition in 1976 in Paris. It brought him success among the public and art dealers. Since 1976, Igor Mitoraj's sculptures and drawings have been shown in 120 solo exhibitions. The artist died on October 6, 2014 in Paris.
