Tadeusz Kantor The Era of the Boy. Drawings from Collection A
Tadeusz Kantor
The Era of the Boy. Drawings from Collection A
4 September 2015 – 31 January 2016
Opening: 4 September 2015 at 6 p.m.
Gallery-Studio of Tadeusz Kantor
7/5 Sienna St., Krakow
At the same time as the opening of Cricoteka in Nadwiślańska Street, at Tadeusz Kantor’s Gallery Studio at 7/5 Sienna Street there will begin a series of exhibitions presenting the unique collection of Tadeusz Kantor’s drawings. The interior was adapted for the purposes of the gallery in accordance with the artist’s own design so as to create an exhibition space for the collection of the artist’s drawings that he had personally assembled from the rich legacy of 289 works, segregated into 40 groups representing the consecutive stages of his art and titled accordingly. Tadeusz Kantor passed the collection on to Anna Halczak, and named it Collection A, after the initial of its owner’s name.
To date, the drawings have not been displayed in the Gallery Studio in their entirety. The exhibition proposal assumes the most comprehensive presentation possible divided into two parts: Collection A and Collection A Annexe, deposited at the National Museum in Krakow. The objects/sculptures presented at the permanent exhibition will be without the presence of an actor – a person that complemented them in the Cricot 2 Theatre. The exhibition of drawings will accompany subsequent editions of the permanent exhibition of Tadeusz Kantor’s art in Cricoteka’s new venue and it will complement the broken relationship between sculpture and man, object and actor. In this manner, the viewer will be thrust into the space between Nadwiślańska Street and Sienna Street and the construct will reach its culmination inside the viewer. The first exhibition, entitled Small Collections, will show the artist’s integrated series of drawings. The exhibition Boyhood will be related to the idea of childhood and memory. At the exhibition Construction and Condition we will be presenting drawings related to the merging of the material and non-material spheres, the pulsation of tension, corporeality and the space outside the window.
The selection of works displayed at The Era of the Boy exhibition is based on the notions of childhood and memory. The exhibition presents a wide context of childhood which is a particularly strong presence in the work of Tadeusz Kantor. However, it is not merely focused on the early years of the artist but also of his contemporaries, e.g. by portraying the tragic fate of Vietnamese boy soldiers Kantor created an image of their unsafe childhood, preserving it for eternity. The artist also touches upon the problem of childhood evading the rules of time. Boy figures presented at the exhibition are not only references to the artist’s memory of his own childhood and himself but they are also a description of the human condition, as is the case in the series of boys ‘maximized by an object’, showing bodies quartered by objects with which they form a single organism, or in drawings depicting boys as wanderers – trapped between childhood and eternal exile.
The exhibition will also present selected drawings by the artist referring directly to objects of the Tadeusz Kantor Exhibition. Episode Two displayed at Nadwiślańska Street, focused around childhood or an impossible return to the ‘classroom’.
Curated by Małgorzata Paluch-Cybulska & Bogdan Renczyński
Maintenance and renovation of window frames and maintenance of wooden roof structure at the Gallery-Studio of Tadeusz Kantor in Kraków co-financed by the Polish Minister of Culture and National Heritage and Marshal’s Office of the Małopolska Region.