Curator, Ann Temkin: Andre Cadere was born in Warsaw, grew up in Romania and came to Paris in the 1960s. There he joined the conceptual generation of artists who, in the 1970s wanted to take art out of the constricted environment of the gallery or the museum and into everyday life.
The way that Cadere did this was to develop a format he called his 'round wooden bars,' which he painted with a household paint in combinations ranging from three to seven colors. Cadere developed these pretty elementary patterns of color, like ABC BCA CAB, to determine the sequences in each bar. However, before he finished with one, he also inserted one flaw so that they would not be absolutely perfect.
Cadere made 200 of these bars, about couple hundred of these bars all in very bold, bright, almost childlike colors that had the kind of feeling of kindergarten blocks or wooden beads. He would take these bars, and …walk around the city holding one over his shoulder or under his arm. And he would enter a gallery setting and walk around with his bar. He might bring one into a subway, into a café, into a store. These were performance pieces as much as sculptures.
Cadere died of cancer in 1978. Today, of course we have no Cadere, but we do have the bars. And we have with them a very strong sense… of what a sculpture could be in relation to a human body and in relation to a lived life. As opposed to a sculpture as something that sits frozen on a pedestal.