Tadeusz Kantor’s Gallery-Studio is opening to the world. The major avant-gardist and theatre reformer whose plays keep providing ongoing inspiration to creators worldwide, spent the final years of his life in a small studio in Krakow, Poland.
Starting from October 2020, Tadeusz Kantor’s Gallery-Studio is available for exploration through an online tour.
The place looks exactly as it did on the day Tadeusz Kantor left it forever. His writings, drawings, personal items, furniture and travel souvenirs are still here. The studio adjoins a gallery furnished according to Kantor’s intentions, hosting temporary exhibitions.
The visualisation allows visitors to view selected exhibitions that took place here, as well as to venture into the world of the imagination of the author of The Dead Class. 360° panoramic tour reveals the contents of drawers and nooks in the apartment, showing Kantor’s late output and the condition of a man near the end of his life. In this way Cricoteka, which has been documenting the creative output of Tadeusz Kantor for the last 40 years, offers access to archival photographs of performances, exhibitions, paintings and drawings, as well as of the artist himself, to visitors from all over the world.
Exposing Kantor’s private world mirrors his idea of an artistic biography as a tool of creation and a fusion of the private and artistic lives.
At last, I have / what I needed: / INDIVIDUAL LIFE! / MINE! / And that is why its strength is increased a hundredfold! / Now it will be victorious in the battle with / the consumerism / of the world. / I can bring it now / onto the stage. / Show it to the public. / And pay the price of / pain, / suffering, / despair, and then / shame, / humiliation, / derision. / I am ... on stage. / I will not be a performer. / Instead, poor fragments of my / own life / will become / "ready-made objects". / Every night, / RITUAL / and SACRIFICE / will be performed here. / All this, / in order to be victorious.(1)
Visitors may take a narrated tour casting light on Kantor’s life and work, and his daily routines. The project in available in English and Polish.
In the year of the 30th anniversary of the artist’s death, Cricoteka invites everyone to explore Kantor’s world.
Virtual tour of Tadeusz Kantor’s Gallery-Studio is available through the link.
(1) Tadeusz Kantor, “To Save from Oblivion 1988”, [in:] A Journey Through Other Spaces. Essays and Manifestos, 1944-1990, translated by Michal Kobialka, Berkeley, CA 1993, p. 170.
