“I think I am a painter who is a sculptor… For me the two things have somehow
come together, so that I am making physical things that are all about somewhere
else, about illusory space.” Anish Kapoor, interviewed in Art Monthly, May 1990
A radical return to painting marks this new solo show by Anish Kapoor, whose work
continues to evolve, seduce and challenge, more than three decades since he first
exhibited at Lisson Gallery. A new group of vast, seething red and white resin and
silicon paintings, emerging from an intensive process of creative exploration,
dominate the main room. These can be read in distinct but overlapping registers,
evoking at once the raw internal spaces of the body and the psyche; the humanist
and realist painterly tradition of Rembrandt, Soutine and Bacon; and the wider
cultural reality of social and political upheaval, violence and trauma.
This new body of work draws on Kapoor’s own artistic history. From his earliest days
as an artist he has made two-dimensional works in ink, acrylic, gouache, oil, pigment
and earth on both paper and canvas. The new paintings also recall his recent
monumental mechanised installations, such as My Red Homeland (2003), Svayambh
and Shooting into the Corner (both 2009), which have all employed visceral expanses
of red wax; this time the painterly manipulation is wrought by an unknown force,
rather than automated by machine. The contested surface of the new silicon works
extends Kapoor’s interest in the legend of Marsyas, whose skin was flayed by the
Greek god Apollo and whose name was used as title for the artist’s 2002 Turbine
Hall commission at Tate Modern.
These new works complement the irregular, convex mirrored surface of his twisted
elliptical stainless steel sculptures which bend the reflected spaces and viewers back
on themselves, reshaping architecture and our spatial experience in turn. Kapoor’s
work addresses interiority and exteriority, the psychological states that accompany
the movement of bodies in space and their relative proximity to these indefinable
objects. Ranging from the intimate to the monumental, Kapoor is this year also
preparing for his largest public exhibition to-date, for the palace and gardens of
Versailles this summer (from June to October).
About the artist
Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. Perhaps most
famous for public sculptures that are both adventures in form and feats of
engineering, he manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous series
of work. Immense PVC skins, stretched or deflated; concave or convex mirrors
whose reflections attract and swallow the viewer; recesses carved in stone and
pigmented so as to disappear: these voids and protrusions summon up deep-felt
metaphysical polarities of presence and absence, concealment and revelation. Forms
turn themselves inside out, womb-like, and materials are not painted but
impregnated with colour, as if to negate the idea of an outer surface, inviting the
viewer to the inner reaches of the imagination. Kapoor’s geometric forms from the early 1980s, for example, rise up from the floor and appear to be made of pure
pigment, while the viscous, blood-red wax sculptures from the last ten years – kinetic
and self-generating – ravage their own surfaces and explode the quiet of the gallery
environment. There are resonances with mythologies of the ancient world – Indian,
Egyptian, Greek and Roman – and with modern times, where twentieth century
events loom large.
Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay, India in 1954 and lives and works in London. He
studied at Hornsey College of Art (1973–77) followed by postgraduate studies at
Chelsea School of Art, London (1977–78). Recent major solo exhibitions include
Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul (2013); Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2013); Museum
of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2012); Le Grand Palais, Paris (2011); Mehboob
Studios, Mumbai and National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2010); Royal
Academy of Arts (2009) and the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2002). He
represented Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale (1990), for which he was awarded
the Premio Duemila. He won the Turner Prize in 1991 and has honorary fellowships
from the London Institute and Leeds University (1997), the University of
Wolverhampton (1999) and the Royal Institute of British Architecture (2001). He
was awarded a CBE in 2003 and a Knighthood in 2013 for services to visual arts.
