Traveling on foot and hopping trains, Nikifor explored Poland, observing the countryside, architecture, and religious practices, making sketches for thousands of mostly small-scale paintings. His source material included illustrations of Secession architecture that he collected. The structure of and the religious paintings inside Poland’s Orthodox and Catholic churches informed his visions of heaven and hell. Devoutly religious, he believed that artists, as creators, would have a special place in heaven. He painted himself as a bishop, judge, and artist.

Nikifor received some recognition for his work in the 1930s but generally lived in poverty. A few exhibitions were held in 1948. Ella and Andrzej Banach worked to exhibit Nikifor’s paintings in Paris and other European cities from 1959 to the early 1960s. On this occasion, established artist Marian Wlosinski, who worked for the communist state and housed Nikifor in his studio starting in 1960, helped him get a passport under the name Nikifor Krynicki, meaning “Nikifor from Krynica,” for his only trip abroad, in 1962. He attended a large retrospective of his work at Warsaw’s Zachęta Art Gallery, one of the country’s most important museums, in 1969. Nikifor died in Folusz and was buried in Krynica, where the Nikifor Museum opened in 1995.