Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw between 1950 and 1954. She initially engaged in painting; however, she quickly gave up the medium in favour of textiles. Her first individual exhibition took place in 1960 at Kordegarda in Warsaw. Two years later, she showed her works at the Biennial in Lausanne, which influenced the crystallisation of the Polish school of textiles.

The exhibition at Zachęta was a big show of contemporary French architecture and the applied arts. Since the second half of the 1950s, cultural exchange between France and Poland had gradually intensified, which manifested itself in state-supported exhibitions. The curator of Forms was a famous interior and furniture designer, René Herbst, a co-founder of the French Union of Modern Artists (L’Union des artistes modernes, UAM) established in 1929, and from 1950 to 1966, head of Formes utiles, a UAM section dedicated to industrial design.