Both a visual artist and a theater director, Tadeusz Kantor was perhaps the most prominent and controversial figure of the twentieth-century Polish avant-garde. The exhibition in São Paulo was part of the International Year of Tadeusz Kantor that was announced by UNESCO to mark the hundredth anniversary of his birth.

Kantor visited the city just once, in 1967, on the occasion of the São Paulo Bienal. But he received a prize there and subsequently became a major reference for the theorists and practitioners of Brazilian contemporary theater, including Antunes Filho, who runs the Center for Theater