Anish Kapoor: Difference between revisions

Anish Kapoor CBE RA (born 12 March 1954) is an Indian-born British sculptor. Born in Mumbai (Bombay),^[1][2] Kapoor has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s when he moved to study art, first at the Hornsey College of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art and Design.

He represented Britain in the XLIV Venice Biennale in 1990, when he was awarded the Premio Duemila Prize. In 1991 he received the Turner Prize and in 2002 received the Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Notable public sculptures include Cloud Gate, Millennium Park, Chicago, Sky Mirror exhibited at the Rockefeller Center, New York in 2006 and Kensington Gardens in 2010, Temenos, at Middlehaven, Middlesbrough, 'Leviathan'^[3] at the Grand Palais in 2011 and ArcelorMittal Orbit^[4] commissioned as a permanent artwork for the Olympic Park and due for completion in 2012.

Anish Kapoor was elected a Royal Academician in 1999^[5] and in 2003 he was made a Commander of the British Empire. In 2011 he was made a Commander in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was awarded the Japanese Praemium Imperiale.

Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay, India to a Jewish mother whose family immigrated from Baghdad when she was a few months old. “She had an Indian-Jewish upbringing. Her father, my grandfather, was the cantor in the synagogue in Pune. At the time, the Jewish community in Mumbai was quite large, mostly consisting of Baghdadi Jews.”^[6] His father, from a Punjabi family, was a hydrographer in the Indian Navy.^[7]

Kapoor spent his early years first in Mumbai, and then in Dehra Dun at the Doon School. During 1971-1973, he went to Israel with one of his two brothers. He first stayed in a kibbutz, and then studied electrical engineering.^[6][8] In Israel, he decided he to become an artist. ^[9] In 1973, he left for Britain to attend Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art and Design.^[7] There he found a role model in Paul Neagu, an artist who provided a meaning to what he was doing.^[10] Kapoor went on to teach at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1979 and in 1982 was Artist in Residence at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. He has lived and worked in London since the early 70s.^[5]

Anish Kapoor first became known in the 1980s for his geometric or biomorphic sculptures made using simple—often elemental—materials such as granite, limestone, marble, pigment and plaster.^[11] These early sculptures are frequently simple, curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly coloured, using powder pigment to define and permeate the form. Such use of pigment characterised his first high profile exhibit as part of the New Sculpture exhibition at the Hayward Gallery London in 1978.

In the late 1980s and 90s he was acclaimed for his remarkable explorations of matter and non-matter, specifically evoking the void in both free-standing sculptural works and ambitious installations. Many of his sculptures since seem to recede into the distance, disappear into the ground or distort the space around them. Kapoor had begun his void pieces around 1985, and in 1987, he begun working in stone.^[12] His later stone works are made of solid, quarried stone, many of which have carved apertures and cavities, often alluding to, and playing with, dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightness-darkness, visible-invisible, conscious-unconscious, male-female and body-mind).

Since 1995 he has worked with the highly reflective surface of polished stainless steel. These works are mirror-like, reflecting or distorting the viewer and surroundings. Over the course of the following decade Kapoor's sculptures ventured into more ambitious, increasingly sublime manipulations of form and space. He produced a number of large works, including Taratantara^[13] (1999), a 35 metre tall piece installed in the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead, England before renovation began there and Marsyas (2002), a large work of steel and PVC that reached end to end of the 3,400-square-foot (320 m²) Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. A stone arch by Kapoor is permanently placed at the shore of a lake in Lødingen in northern Norway. In 2000, one of Kapoor's works, Parabolic Waters, consisting of rapidly rotating coloured water, was shown outside the Millennium Dome in London.

The use of red wax is also part of his current repertoire, evocative of flesh, blood and transfiguration. In 2007, he showed Svayambh^[14] (which translated from Sanskrit means 'self-generated'), a 1.5 metre block of red wax that moved on rails through the Nantes Musée des Beaux-Arts as part of the Biennale estuaire; this piece was shown again in a major show at the Haus Der Kunst in Munich and in 2009 at the Royal Academy in London. Kapoor's recent work increasingly blurs the boundaries between architecture and art.

In 2008, Kapoor created the sculpture Memory^[15] in Berlin and New York for the Guggenheim Foundation. It is the first piece the artist has done in Cor-Ten, which is formulated to produce a protective coating of rust. Weighing 24 tons and made up of 156 parts, the piece calls to mind Richard Serra’s huge rusty steel works, which also invite viewers into perceptually confounding interiors.^[16]

In 2009 Kapoor became the first Guest Artistic Director of Brighton Festival. As well as informing the content of the festival as a whole, Kapoor installed four significant sculptures for the duration of the festival; Sky Mirror at Brighton Pavilion gardens, C-Curve^[17] at The Chattri, Blood Relations (a collaboration with author Salman Rushdie) and 1000 Names, both at Fabrica. He also created two new works: a large site-specific work titled 'The Dismemberment of Jeanne d’Arc'^[18] and a performance based installation: ‘Imagined Monochrome’. The public response was so overwhelming that police had to re-divert traffic around C Curve at the Chattri and exercise crowd control.

In September 2009 Kapoor was the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. As well as surveying his career to date it also included new works. On display were 'Non-Object' mirror works, cement sculptures previously unseen, and 'Shooting into the Corner'^[19] a cannon that fires pellets of wax into the corner of the gallery. Previously shown at MAK, Vienna in January 2009, it is a work with dramatic presence and associations and also continues Kapoor's interest in the self made object, as the wax builds up on the walls and floor of the gallery the work slowly oozes out its form.

In spring 2011, Kapoor's work, "Leviathan",^[20] was the annual "Monumenta" installation for the Grand Palais in Paris.^[21][22] Kapoor described the work as: "A single object, a single form, a single colour... My ambition is to create a space with in a space that responds to the height and luminosity of the Nave at the Grand Palais. Visitors will be invited to walk inside the work, to immerse themselves in colour, and it will, I hope, be a contemplative and poetic experience".

Also in 2011, Kapoor exhibited the work 'Dirty Corner'^[23] at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan. Fully occupying the site's 'cathedral' space, the work consists of a huge steel volume that measures 60 metres long and 8 metres high in which visitors can enter. Upon entry, the viewer begins to lose their perception of space, as it gets progressively darker and darker until there is no light, forcing people to use their other senses to guide them through the space. The entrance of the tunnel is goblet-shaped, featuring an interior and exterior surface that is circular, making minimal contact with the ground. Over the course of the exhibition, the work will be progressively covered by some 160 cubic metres of earth by a large mechanical device, forming a sharp mountain of dirt in which the tunnel appears to be running through.

Kapoor's earliest public commissions include the Cast Iron Mountain at the Tachikawa Art Project in Japan, as well as an untitled work in Toronto. In 2001, Sky Mirror, a large mirror piece that reflects the sky and surroundings, was commissioned for a site outside the Nottingham Playhouse. Since 2006, Cloud Gate, a 110-ton stainless steel sculpture with a mirror finish, has been permanently installed in Millennium Park in Chicago. Viewers are able to walk beneath the sculpture and look up into an omphalos or navel above them.

In the autumn of 2006, a second 10 metre Sky Mirror, was installed in the Rockefeller Center, New York. This work was later exhibited in Kensington Gardens in 2010 as part of the show 'Turning the World Upside Down' along with three other major mirror works.

In 2009, Kapoor created the permanent, site-specific work 'Earth Cinema'^[25] for Pollino National Park, the largest national park in Italy, as part of the project ArtePollino – Another South.^[26][27] Kapoor's work, Cinema di Terra (Earth Cinema), is a 45m long, 3m wide and 7m deep cut into the landscape made from concrete and earth.^[26] People can enter from both sides and walk along it viewing the earth void within.^[27][28] Cinema di Terra officially opened to public in September 2009.^[26]

Kapoor has also been commissioned to produce five pieces of public art by Tees Valley Regeneration (TVR), to be collectively known as the "Tees Valley Giants".^[29] The first of these sculptures, Tememos, was unveiled to the public in June 2010. Temenos stands 50 metres high and is 110 metres in length. A steel wire mesh pulled taught between two enormous steel hoops, it remains an ethereal and an uncertain form despite its colossal scale.

In 2010, an Anish Kapoor sculpture called Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem was commissioned and installed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The sculpture is described as a "16-foot tall polished-steel hourglass" and it "reflects and reverses the Jerusalem sky and the museum's landscape, a likely reference to the city's duality of celestial and earthly, holy and profane."^[30]

Also in June, Kapoor's "Orbit"^[31] was announced as the winning proposal for an artwork for the 2012 Olympic Games. The Greater London Authority selected Kapoor's sculpture from a shortlist of five artists as the permanent artwork for the Olympic Park. At 115 metres tall, Orbit will be the tallest sculpture in the U.K.

Also soon to be completed is a granite monument to commemorate the British victims of 9/11 in New York’s Hanover Square.^[32]

When asked if engagement with people and places is the key to successful public art, Kapoor said,

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.^[33]

Throughout his career, Kapoor has worked extensively with architects and engineers. Kapoor insists that this body of work is neither pure sculpture nor pure architecture. Notable architectural projects include:

• Ark Nova,^[34] an inflatable concert Hall that will travel around the earthquake struck regions of Ja[pan. In collaboration with architect Arata Isozaki
• Orbit,^[35] the permanent artwork for the Olympic Park, in collaboration with engineer Cecil Balmond.
• "Temenos" the first work of the recently announced Tees Valley Giants, the world's five largest sculptures, in collaboration with Cecil Balmond. Temenos^[36] is situated in Middlehaven Dock, Middlesbrough.
• "Dismemberment Site 1",^[37] installed in New Zealand at the sculpture park known as "The Farm" and owned by New Zealand businessman and art patron Alan Gibbs.
• Leonard Street,^[38] New York, Collaboration with architechts Herzog and de Meuron.
• Two subway stations in Naples at Monte San Angelo^[39] and Triano^[40] in collaboration with Future Systems.
• A proposal for the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain.
• "Taratantara"^[41] (1999–2000) was installed at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and later at Piazza Plebiscito, Naples.
• An unrealised project^[42] for the Millennium Dome, London, (1995) in collaboration with Philip Gumuchdjian.
• "Building for a Void",^[43] created for Expo '92, Seville, in collaboration with David Connor.

Of his vision for the Cumana station in Monte Sant'Angelo, Naples, Italy under construction (as of June 2008), Kapoor has said:

It’s very vulva-like. The tradition of the Paris or Moscow metro is of palaces of light, underground. I wanted to do exactly the opposite – to acknowledge that we are going underground. So it’s dark, and what I’ve done is bring the tunnel up and roll it over as a form like a sock.^[44]

A collaboration with author Salman Rushdie, Kapoor for the first time conceived a mesmeric sculpture consisting of two bronze boxes conjoined with red wax and inscribed around the outside with the first two paragraphs of Rushdie's text; "Blood Relations"^[45] or an "Interrogation of the Arabian Nights" in 2006.^[46]

Kapoor has designed stage sets that include: the opera "Idomeneo" at Glyndebourne in 2003; Pelléas et Mélisande" for La Monnaie in Brussels, and a dance-theatre piece called "in-i" for Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche at the National Theatre in London.^[47]

Kapoor initially began exhibiting as part of New British Sculpture art scene, along with fellow British sculptors Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon.^[11] His first solo exhibition took place at Patrice Alexandra, Paris, in 1980.^[48] In 1992 Kapoor contributed to documenta IX with the Building Decent into Limbo.^[49] He achieved widespread recognition when he represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale.^[50] Solo exhibitions of his work have since been held in the Tate and Hayward Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland, Reina Sofia in Madrid, the National Gallery in Ottawa, Musee des arts contemporains (Grand-Hornu) in Belgium, the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux, the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Brazil, and the Guggenheim in Bilbao and New York. In 2008, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston exhibited Kapoor's first U.S. mid-career survey.^[51] That same year, Kapoor’s Islamic Mirror (2008), a circular concave mirror, was installed in a 13th-century Arab palace now being used as by the Convent of Santa Clara in Murcia.^[52] Kapoor was the first living British artist to take over the Royal Academy, London, in 2009;^[53] the show attracted 275,000 visitors, making it the most successful exhibition ever by a living artist in London.^[54] In 2010, Kapoor retrospective exhibitions were held at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi and Mumbai’s Mehboob Studio, the first showcase of his work in the country of his birth.^[55][56] In 2011 Kapoor has had a solo touring exhibition with the Arts Council, part of their "Flashback " series of shows. In May he exhibited "Leviathan" at the Grand Palais, and two con-current shows in Milan at the Rotunda di via Basana and Fabbric de Vappore.

Kapoor's gallery representations include the Lisson Gallery, London and the Gladstone Gallery, New York.

Kapoor's work is collected worldwide, notably by the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Tate Modern in London; Fondazione Prada in Milan; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Guggenheim in Bilbao; the De Pont Foundation in the Netherlands; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan; and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.^[5]

Kapoor represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, 1990, where he was awarded the Premio Duemila. The following year, he won the prestigious Turner Prize. Kapoor was elected Royal Academician in 1999 and has been awarded Honorary Fellowships by the London Institute and Leeds University (1997), University of Wolverhampton (1999) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (2001).^[5] In October 2011 Kapoor was presented with the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo City.^[57]

In 2012, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan.

Kapoor made a $27 million profit in 2008, taking the fortune he has made from his art to an estimated $62.7 million.^[58] His record auction price is 1.94 million pounds, set in July 2008.

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Anish Kapoor.

• Anish Kapoor Official Site
• Lisson Gallery: Anish Kapoor
• Barbara Gladstone: Anish Kapoor
• Anish Kapoor on Artcyclopedia
• The Orbit Project for the London Olympics 2012.
• Leviathan Monumenta 2011, Grand Palais, Paris.
• Marsyas About Kapoor's 2002 installation piece in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.
• Cloud Gate Images and description of Kapoor's public sculpture at Millennium Park, Chicago.
• Sky Mirror Website with images and articles on Kapoor's public sculpture in Nottingham, England
• BBC Hardtalk Gavin Esler interviews Anish Kapoor for BBC World (TV), Nov. 11, 2006.
• Boston ICA Details and images of Kapoor's exhibit at the ICA.
• Anish Kapoor in Brighton The Fabrica Blog for Anish Kapoors involvement in Brighton Festival, details, critique, images and further links.
• Anish Kapoor's 2009 exhibition at the Royal Academy. Includes videos
• In conversation with John Tusa BBC Radio 3.
• Anish Kapoor's 2009 installation Earth Cinema

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