Henryk Stażewski was a pioneer of the Avant-garde movement in Poland, a proponent of Constructivism and Geometric Abstraction, a designer of theatre sets and interior design schemes, as well as poster art. During the interwar period, he was associated with the activities of numerous avant-garde groups, notably the Formists, Blok, and Praesens. Together with Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński, he co-founded the International Collection of Modern Art, which was presented to the Art Museum in Lodz. Stażewski’s works have been part of many exhibitions and collections around the world, among them the Foksal Gallery, Warsaw; the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Venice Biennale; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute, Chicago; the Royal Academy, London; the Museum of Art, Lodz; Tate Modern, London; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Dallas Museum of Art; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Daimler Art Collection, Stuttgart; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 1972 he was awarded the Gottfried von Herder Prize by the University of Vienna.

In the second half of the 1950s, Stażewski added a new element to his art practice - the relief. This form would displace pure painting media in his art for thirty years. Initially, his reliefs were very loosely structured and were constructed of colourful, roughly textured elements superimposed on organic forms. His later reliefs were characterised by elements covered with "halftone screens," which energised their surface by creating the illusion of vibrations. The works of the early part of this decade also show the artist's fascination with colour, which was a manifestation of his thoughts on the neutrality of form and its dependence on the compositional context. Stażewski's exploration of the infinity of potential configurations of a series of moving barrel-like elements was a manifestation of his confrontation of the concepts of order and chance, and essentially created situations that were possible but had not yet come to fruition.