André Cadere

Between 1971 and his premature death in 1978, André Cadere, a Warsaw-born artist of Romanian descent, made around 200 handcrafted, round, wooden bars of various sizes and color combinations. He would carry them around, placing them so that they performed a sort of cut through the space, leaning them against trees, walls, kiosks, and, most famously, placing them next to the works of other artists at exhibition openings, often when not invited. In the series of photographs from his first visit to New York in 1975 (the only series known to have been made by the artist himself) we can see the different relationships he enacted within the space each time, our eyes wandering in search of the bar in the unfamiliar landscapes, mimicking, in a way, the figure of the wandering stranger with whom Cadere, a Romanian émigré, identified.

Despite the difficulty such a choice of practice entailed, with, at the beginning, the bars often being confiscated and the artist himself ejected from the premises, Cadere persisted in taking his art outside the art circuit wherever he went, thus opening up possibilities for his work to be seen. This expansion of the limits set by museums and galleries regarding where and how art is encountered and experienced is mirrored by the artist’s use of circular segments for the bars, meaning they had no top or bottom, back or front and could be put or hung anywhere. Referring to them as Peinture sans fin (Painting Without End), Cadere was attempting to make painting potentially present in literally any corner.

SK