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.
