ANISH KAPOOR

 

Bombay 1954

 

«I’m thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects.» (A. Kapoor, 2008)

Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay in 1954 to an Indian father and a Jewish-Iraqi mother. After having attended an electronics course in Israel between 1971 and 1972, he moved to England where he initially studied at the Hornsey College of Art and then at the Chelsea School of Art Design in London. Already in his early works, Kapoor’s interest was focused on themes such as the dialectic of opposites, sexuality and rituals. In harmony with arte povera and the example of Joseph Beuys, he pursued an expanded, “enlarged” concept of sculpture in order to embrace new forms and significance. In 1979, he rediscovered India and became conscious of his own position along the subtle dividing line between two cultures, that of the East and that of the West. Upon his return to England, he produced his 1000 Names series: unstable sculptural objects between geometry and biomorphism completely covered in pigment, the intense colour which circumvents its being an object and evokes a sense of infinite space. After his first solo shows in Paris and London (1980-81) Kapoor began a period of collaboration with Nicholas Logsdail’s London-based Lisson Gallery, a breeding ground of sculptors belonging to the New British Sculpture group. The initial tension between opposite dualities – male-female, tangible-intangible- interior-exterior gradually come to resolution (Place, 1983; Mother as a Mountain,1985). In 1990, Kapoor was selected to represent Great Britain at the 44a Venice Biennial, where he won the Duemila Award. The following year he was the recipient of the Turner Prize (Void Field, 1989), which consolidated his international success. He presented Descent into Limbo at the 1992 Documenta 9 in Kassel. His works grew larger in size, not only invading but absorbing space, which produced a perceptive as well as physical and sensual impact on spectators as testified by his architectural work Building for Void commissioned that same year by the Seville Expo. Kapoor’s experimentation with an array of materials including granite, Carrara marble, slate and sandstone (Ghost, 1998) – and his work with reflecting, deforming surfaces which cancel the image (Double Mirror, 1997) or imprint a sense of vertigo (Turning the World Upside Down, 1995; Suck, 1998), reflect his continuous experiments with materials in order to free them from any form and lend a tangible form to empty space. In this regard, his most masterful staging of massive voids were Taratantara: a double trumpet 51 metres long and 32 metres high, and another work entitled Marsyas (2002) executed in red PVC membrane and vaguely reminiscent of pulled skin. Created in 1999 for the Baltic Centre for contemporary Art in Gateshead, it was re-proposed in Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples in 2000 for the L'arte in piazza event. In 2003, he showed his work at the Naples Archaeological Museum. Recently, he has received major commissions for public works such as: Cloud Gate at the Millennium Park in Chicago (2004), Sky Mirror in Nottingham (2001) and at the Rockefeller Centre in New York (2006); and Memory at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin (2008). Kapoor lives and works in London.