Mircea
Cantor

Mircea Cantor, born in 1977 (Oradea, Romania), is an artist who, in his own terms, prefers to refer to himself as an earthling. His multidisciplinary practice is first and foremost to be understood as a quest for visual poetry, meditation and spirituality. Inspired by the large and small events of everyday life, and through an ingenious plays with rhythm, repetition and symmetry, Cantor succeeds in creating strong poetic images which have the capacity to linger in the mind. His works allow us to reflect upon the freedom of our movements, ideas of borders and limitations and the courageous but sometimes audacious attempts to sublimate or subvert.

At the beginning of the 2000’s, he drew attention to himself with the film The Landscape Is Changing (2003) in which was shown several demonstrators brandishing mirrors by way of slogans. Two years later, he made Deeparture, a video depicting the encounter between a wolf and a deer in the empty space of a gallery. His choice of media is however quite diverse, using video, sculpture, installation art, graphical conception —he created the graphical charter for the Frac Pays de la Loire, a regional collection in France— and more recently, he dabbled in set design for the theatrical production of the Petit Prince [The Little Prince] by Alexandru Dabija at the Teatrul de Comedie in Bucarest (2017). For the anniversary season of the Opéra de Paris, Mircea Cantor was also invited in 2018 to produce drawings for the performances’ programmes. The practice of drawing thus occupies an essential place in the work of Mircea Cantor. As early as 2011, he was interested in Chinese painters and Japanese Zen painters of the 19th century, especially because of the speed with which they succeed in shaping ideas or their subject. It is this quest for the “prima linea”, with the lively and concise stroke imposed by circumstances, that Mircea Cantor enjoys.

Mircea Cantor is the winner of the Paul Ricard fundation price (2004) and of the Marcel Duchamp price (2011). His artworks have been integrated into many famous international collections such as the MoMA (New York), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphie), Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museum Albteiberg (Mönchengladbach), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Kunsthaus (Zurich), Collection Pinault (Paris), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), Rennie Collection (Vancouver).

Amongst his most recent solo shows are the performance The Sound of my Body is the Memory of my Presence at the Greek Theather of Siracusa (INDA season, Syracuse, 2020), the exhibition produced at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature on the occasion of the France-Romania Season (Paris, 2019) and the ones at the Musée d’Arts de Nantes (Nantes, 2019), Fondation d’Entreprise Hermès (Tokyo, 2018), Fondazione Giuliani (Rome, 2017), Fondation Francès (Senlis, 2016).

He is currently represented by Magazzino (Rome) and the Dvir Gallery (Tel Aviv/Brussels).