Tadeusz Kantor

Tadeusz Kantor (born 1915 in Wielopole Skrzyńskie, died 1990 in Krakow) is one of the most significant Polish artists of the 20th century. Alongside his work as a visual artist he was also involved in the performing arts: he is regarded as a pioneering theatre reformer influenced by the ideas of avant-garde artists. Kantor was particularly interested in disrupting the illusion created by classical theatre, and aimed to break up the prevailing distancing engendered by the stage situation and open it up to real life. He was thus among those 20th-century artists who proclaimed and practised an open concept of art transgressing all its boundaries. The artist attained world renown in the 1970s with the travelling theatre group Cricot², which he established in the mid-1950s.

Instead of a traditional retrospective, structured according to periods and categories, the exhibition at the migros museum für gegenwartskunst is informed by a free scenic character, which attempts to exhibit Kantor’s works as a Gesamtkunstwerk. This holistic concept held true for Kantor throughout his life. The focal point of the exhibition is the investigation of the performative, and the crossover between theatre and the visual arts. Thus it is a continuation of the content-discursive debate on current artistic interests in combination with and overlapping theatrical performative approaches in contemporary art, which has already been investigated in several previous exhibition projects.

Curated by Heike Munder