Eleanor Antin: A Retrospective

Eleanor Antin is one of the most important American artists to address feminist themes over the last five decades, and her works are regarded as classics of feminist genre. She hails from the New York conceptual art movement, but has combined its intellectual rigour with a sensitivity to cultural and social issues typical of the West Coast, where she has lived for most of her life. Antin explores themes related to fluid identities, gender and social class. She employs a variety of media, which she combines depending on the nature of the project. These most commonly include: installation, painting, drawing, writing, photography, performance and film.

Antin is a renowned doyenne in the West; her works feature in major collections and art history publications. In Poland, only individual works of hers have been exhibited to date. The exhibition Eleanor Antin: A Retrospective will thus not only be the first comprehensive exhibition of this artist’s oeuvre in our country, but also an opportunity to discover its conceptual richness, closely linked to the avant-garde art that has emerged since the 1960s and continues to this day.

The exhibition primarily aims to present a comprehensive overview of Antin’s work, pivoted around the key themes that have preoccupied the artist. Chronological order gives way here to a formal and, at the same time, conceptual organisation. This allows us to recognise those aspects of her work that capture the spirit of the era, but above all those that ensure it remains relevant today. The exhibition showcases not only thematic diversity but also the artist’s remarkable consistency, as the same themes, explored in different ways, appear in works separated by considerable periods.

The exhibition opens with the well-known installation 100 Boots, a collection of rubber boots which the artist arranged in various locations: in open spaces and within the interiors of cultural institutions. Next comes a group of early works, the themes of which would recur in later projects, and in which Antin reveals, through simple gestures, how the female body is shaped by culturally accepted systems of assumptions (and, consequently, systems of norms, proportions and measures). These include, for example, photographs from the series Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, depicting the artist’s own process of losing weight. Linked to this group is another: works inspired by classic cinema, in which Antin takes on the roles of fictional yet real-life figures. She appears, for example, as a Ballerina, critiquing classical ideals of beauty, and as Florence Nightingale, the legendary nurse from the Crimean War.

Similar inspirations – historical fiction interwoven with real events and facts, and the aesthetics of silent cinema – feature in a significant body of work devoted to memory. Here, the artist draws directly on European Jewish heritage. This is also her own heritage, as Antin’s parents were Jewish emigrants from Poland (an area now part of Ukraine). Themes of nostalgia, suffering, concern and resistance are present, for example, in the monumental spatial-cinematic installation Vilna Nights. Autobiographical themes also appear in the works the artist has dedicated to women who are important to her: intellectuals, artists and researchers. Among them is Antin’s own mother – an actress in Yiddish theatres in pre-war Poland.

Another significant group of works explores the dilemmas associated with the exercise of power, its effectiveness and service to its subjects. In these late, monumental staged photographs, the artist addresses the themes of the wealth and moral decline of empires. Her visions of ancient Rome are shaped by the aesthetics of Hollywood’s golden age. The works are intended to reflect the contemporary condition of the United States and, more broadly, of Western civilisation, which the artist does not hold back from criticising.

The exhibition is the result of collaboration of MOCAK with MUDAM The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg and Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, and the Kraków edition was initiated by Adam Budak.

Eleanor Antin (born 1935 in New York) is a visual artist with roots in 1970s conceptual art and a leading figure in second-wave feminism.

Her parents were Jewish emigrants from the-then Poland. She studied at, amongst other places, The City College in New York and the Tamara Daykarhanova School for the Stage. In 1968, she settled in California. Between 1975 and 2002, she worked at the University of California, San Diego.

Antin has exhibited her work all over the world. She has collaborated with, amongst others, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She has participated in the Venice Biennale. Her works are held in public collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Organisers:

MUDAM The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg

Curator: Bettina Steinbrügge in collaboration with Clémentine Proby and Julie Kohn

Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

Curators: Christiane Meyer-Stoll, Henrik Utermöhle

MOCAK The Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków

Curators: Mirosława Bałazy, Magdalena Ujma

The exhibition has been subsidised from the funds of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage

Opening: 4 December 2026

5 December 2026 – 21 March 2027

MOCAK, level 0