Edward Krasinski (1925–2004) was one of the most important artists of the European post-war avant-garde. He sought to reduce sculpture to a mere line, epitomized by his use of blue adhesive tape, which he placed at a height of 130 centimeters across his installation works. “I encompass everything with it and go everywhere,” he once explained. “This is art, or is it?”

The blue tape extends across walls and objects in his Warsaw studio, which has been preserved as he left it. When I first visited the studio—in an apartment on the top floor of an ordinary block of flats from the communist era—I found myself surprised and confused. Years later, curating Krasinski’s retrospective at Tate Modern and then the Stedelijk, I wanted visitors to feel the same while discovering his co...