Theatre of Cruelty

Theatre of Cruelty is rooted in, and takes its name from, Antonin Artaud’s radical vision of experimental theatre formulated in the 1930s. For Artaud, “cruelty” was never mere shocking bloodshed, but a merciless intensity – a demand to confront existence in its rawness, its suffering, its ecstasy, and its mortal edge.

Bringing this vision into the present, the exhibition gathers artists across generations and disciplines—Ed Atkins, Angélique Aubrit & Ludovic Beillard, Tobias Bradford, Romeo Castellucci, Pan Daijing, Tadeusz Kantor, Liza Lacroix, and Michel Nedjar. Through theatre, performance, sound, painting, sculpture, video, and kinetic installation, their works refuse narrative comfort, instead staging acts of exorcisms that unsettle and disturb, embodying existential melancholy, ruptured language, the force of gesture, and the primal energy Artaud imagined.

This group exhibition invites visitors into a heightened sensory experience, where theatricality becomes a field of radical exploration, challenging perception and embracing all forms of expressive intensity.

Photo: Ed Atkins, Ed Atkins with Steven Zultanski, Gladstone Gallery, New York (17.11.2023 - 06.01.2024) © Courtesy of the artist