Collection: Kantorowicz Serge

Biography

Serge Kantorowicz, a painter of Polish origin born in 1942 in Paris, was raised by his maternal grandmother Gitla Berger after his parents were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This tragedy would mark the artist with an original gap that evokes the dramaturgy of Tadeusz Kantor.
"Independent theatre continues on the canvas: Kantorowicz incessantly paints the capital scene to rediscover the dizzying concomitance of the holocaust and the moment saved by the work, the all too real work that suspends the death of his loved ones in indefinite unreality," writes the writer and art historian Hubert Haddad in a study.
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Serge Kantorowicz studied drawing and printmaking at the Lycée Saint-Étienne des Arts Graphiques, then as a free student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Brussels from 1962. At the end of the sixties, he became an engraver in the Maeght workshops and then in the workshop he shared with his cousin, the painter Sam Szafran. This is how he worked for Riopelle, Joan Mitchell, Henri Michaux, Miro, Calder, Giacometti and Vasarely.
Serge Kantorowicz devoted himself entirely to his art from 1973. He himself is a master of printmaking in all its forms: wood and copper engraving, lithography, screen printing, etc. The Delacroix of the sketches, Cézanne and Picasso were his first significant encounters.
An exceptional draftsman – he has internalized the great expressionist art of a Toulouse-Lautrec or an Edward Munch –, he is also a painter of rare power close to the heightened sensibilities of an Emil Nolde or a Music. Of figurative inspiration, at the extreme edge of the neo-abstract investigations of the New York School, we recognize in him, alongside and in the extension of a sort of universal, encyclopedic Kabbalah, this expressive madness recalling to memory all the specters of the assassinated Yiddish culture.
An alchemist of the color black and a great lover of bodies that he celebrates and torments in an eroticism that is as raw as it is ghostly, Serge Kantorowicz moves seamlessly from miniature to oil in his notebooks and his books painted in the largest formats where he displays a polymorphic dexterity à la Max Ernst.
A great reader, passionate about the intersection of artistic expressions, he is involved in vast pictorial or graphic series around major artists, a kind of mise en abyme of his admirations through painting alone: ​​major thematic exhibitions on the work of Hugo, the characters of Balzac's Human Comedy, the dream world of Alfred Kubin, but also Kafka, Tadeusz Kantor, Bruno Shulz, etc.
We also owe him astonishing dreamlike genre scenes, on the Goya side, and deserted urban landscapes, a pretext to explore, in the perpetuity of Cézanne, the futuristic reverse of perspective through violent light contrasts.
Since 1977, Serge Kantorowicz has exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, including the Galerie Nina Dausset (Paris), the European Parliament (Luxembourg), the Galerie Krikhaar (Amsterdam), the Galerie Georges Fall (Paris), the American Hebrew Congregation (New York), the Maison de Balzac (Paris), the Musée Victor Hugo (Paris), the Galerie Pascal Gabert (Paris), La Non-Maison (Aix-en-Provence), etc.
Works by the artist have been acquired by numerous public institutions, including the National Fund for Contemporary Art of the City of Paris, the European Parliament of Strasbourg, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of the City of Luxembourg.
Carlos Semprun Maura, Pierre Daix, François Cervantes, Emil Weiss, Daniel Chaput, among others, have written about his work. Serge Kantorowicz has also collaborated on many publications, collections of poems, art books and magazines, as an illustrator and painter.