Allan Kaprow: I will always be a painter – of sorts

Allan Kaprow (Atlantic City, 1927 – Encinitas, 2006) multidisciplinary artist who explored a wide range of media throughout his intense career. In line with the cross-contamination of performance, theatre, dance and the visual arts, his works promoted an ever-increasing integration between spaces, materials, time and people.

He was also very active as a theorist, inspiring generations of artists and promoting an idea of art that was at once conceptual, utopian, political, spontaneous, provocative and highly ironic.

After an early career as a painter, strongly influenced by Jackson Pollock’s Action Painting, between the late 1950s and the early 1960s he abandoned more classical means of expression to focus on creating environments and interactive, ephemeral actions that questioned notions about monumental art.