Kapoor, Anish

▪ 2009

born 1954, Bombay [now Mumbai], India

 In 2008 the first American museum survey of Anish Kapoor's work in more than 15 years was featured at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future highlighted the Indian-born London-based artist's dazzling use of rich colours, polished surfaces, and sensuous forms. Kapoor emerged as part of a generation of British sculptors who gained recognition in the 1980s for their use of abstract and organic forms. He came to prominence for his biomorphic sculptures and installations made in materials as varied as stone, aluminum, and resin that appeared to challenge gravity, depth, and perception. Throughout his career Kapoor explored dualities such as presence and absence, solid and void, and reflection and absorption.

      Kapoor made London his home in 1973, and he studied at the Hornsey College of Art until 1977 and at the Chelsea School of Art from 1977 to 1978. A visit to India in 1979 sparked new perspectives on his homeland. These were reflected through his use of saturated pigments and striking architectural forms in bodies of work such as 1000 Names. Created between 1979 and 1980, this series consisted of arrangements of abstract geometric forms coated with loose powdered pigments that spilled beyond the object itself and onto the floor or wall. Kapoor went on to represent Great Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale and was awarded the Premio Duemila for his installation Void Field, a grid of rough sandstone blocks each with a mysterious black hole penetrating its top surface. In 1991 he was honoured with the prestigious Turner Prize. Kapoor continued to explore the idea of the void through the 1990s, creating series of works that incorporated human-scale constructions that receded into walls, disappeared into floors, or dramatically changed depth with a simple change in perspective. He received an honorary fellowship from the London Institute in 1997 and another in 2001 from the Royal Institute of British Architecture.

 Kapoor's interest in addressing site and architecture led him to create projects that became increasingly ambitious in scale and construction. For his 2002 installation Marsyas at the Tate Modern in London, Kapoor created a trumpetlike form by erecting three massive steel rings joined by a span of fleshy-red PVC membrane that stretched across the museum's 155-m (550-ft)-long Turbine Hall. In 2004 Kapoor unveiled Cloud Gate in Chicago's Millennium Park; the 110-ton highly polished stainless steel elliptical archway, nicknamed “the bean,” was his first permanent site-specific installation in the United States. For just over a month in 2006, Kapoor installed Sky Mirror, an 11-m (35-ft)-diameter concave stainless-steel mirror in New York City's Rockefeller Center. Both Cloud Gate and Sky Mirror reflected and transformed their surroundings and demonstrated Kapoor's ongoing experimental investigation of material, form, and space.

Michal Raz-Russo

* * *