Mircea Cantor - Seeing Red London Saturday, March 16, 2024 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    Artist's Studio

  • Artist Biography

    Mircea Cantor

    • 1977

    Mircea Cantor is an artist who, in his words, “lives and works on Earth". He is the winner of the
    Marcel Duchamp Prize (Paris, 2011). An artist in search of visual poetry, reflection, meditation and
    whose polymorphous practice is inspired by everyday life, Cantor manages, through ingenious
    games of repetition, rhythm and symmetry, to create powerful poetic images leaving an indelible
    imprint on the mind. His works thus encourage us to meditate on our own freedom of movement, the
    concepts of borders and limitations, and on the courageous but often audacious attempts at
    sublimation of the world.


    In the early 2000s, he gained attention with the film The Landscape Is Changing (2003) in which
    demonstrators brandished large mirrors as slogans. Two years later, he directed the video
    Deeparture (2005), which shows the meeting between a wolf and a doe in the empty space of the
    Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris. Its means of expression are, however, more diverse than the
    cinematic medium alone. He tries his hand at sculpture, installation, photography, drawing, or more
    recently, scenography as part of a production of The Little Prince by Alexandru Dabija at the Teatrul
    de Comedie in Bucharest (2017).


    On the occasion of the 350th anniversary season of the Paris Opera in 2019, he was also invited to
    illustrate the various programs of the season with his drawings made in situ during rehearsals.
    Drawing takes up more and more space in his practice. From 2011, he became interested in 19th
    century Chinese painters and Japanese Zen painters, particularly for the speed with which the latter
    managed to give form to ideas or their subject. It is this search for the “prima linea”, the lively and
    concise line imposed by circumstances, that Mircea Cantor is fond of.


    His works have joined major international collections such as the MoMA (New York), the Walker Art
    Center (Minneapolis), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia), and the National Museum of
    Modern Art – Center Pompidou (Paris) among others.


    Recent solo exhibitions include one at Villa Medici (Rome 2021); the performance “The Sound of my
    Body is the Memory of my Presence” at the Greek Theater of Syracuse (INDA season, Syracuse,
    2020), at the Museum of Hunting and Nature on the occasion of the France-Romania season (Paris,
    2019), amd at the Nantes Museum of Arts (Nantes, 2019) among others.


    Mircea Cantor is decorated with the Order of Officer of Arts and Letters, France (2019) and the
    National Order of Merit with the rank of Knight, Romania (2019). His last detailed monograph was
    published in 2020 by Dilecta, Paris.

     

     
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Artisans are rope Dior

signed, titled and dated 'Mircea Cantor - Artisans are rope Dior 2023' lower centre
ink on paper
42 x 60 cm (16 1/2 x 23 5/8 in.)
Executed in 2023.

Price On Request

Seeing Red