September 14, 2013

ANISH KAPOOR AT MARTIN – GROPIUS – BAU IN BERLIN




ANISH KAPOOR AT MARTIN – GROPIUS – BAU IN BERLIN
Curated by Norman Rosenthal
18 May 2013 – 24 November 2013




ANISH KAPOOR AT MARTIN – GROPIUS – BAU IN BERLIN
Curated by Norman Rosenthal
18 May 2013 – 24 November 2013
Anish Kapoor is one of the most important of the world’s contemporary artists. Since his first sculptures simple forms with paint pigments spread out on the floor – Kapoor has developed a multi-faceted oeuvre using various materials, such as stone, steel, glass, wax, PVC skins and high-tech material. In his objects, sculptures and installations the boundaries between painting and sculpture become blurred. For his first major exhibition in Berlin he will use the whole of the ground floor of the Martin-Gropius-Bau, including the magnificent atrium. Some of the works will have been specially designed for this venue. The show, comprising about 70 works, will provide a survey of the abstract poetic work from 1982 to the present.
Born in Mumbai in 1954, Kapoor is among the most prominent representatives of British sculpture. He came to London in 1973 to study sculpture at the Hornsey College of Art and has lived and worked there ever since. At that time Hornsey was the most radical of London’s art colleges and the one most open to the Marcuse-inspired revolutions that swept the student movements. In 1990 he represented the UK at the Venice Biennale where he was awarded the coveted prize “Premio 2000” by the International Jury. In 1991 he received the prestigious Turner Prize. Since the early 1980s his works – many of which have won further awards – have been exhibited worldwide.
What is characteristic of Kapoor’s work is his unlimited ability to constantly reinvent the language of art, both in its monumental and in its intimate dimensions, and the many dualities which come to light in his search for aesthetic effects both in perfection and in chaos. His creations are made of natural and artificial materials. They serve Kapoor’s endlessly inventive and suggestive pursuit of abstract metaphor. Some of the works to be shown in the exhibition in the Martin-Gropius-Bau are described briefly below:
The use of paint pigments has been a regular feature of Kapoor’s work since the 1970s. In “White Sand, Red Millet, Many Flowers” (1982), for example, he draws inspiration from the land of his birth: India. Objects reminiscent of the decorative elements in Indian temples or Buddhist stupas have been covered with thick layers of gleaming pigment powder in red, yellow and black.
In the late 1980s Kapoor worked with stone. “Wound” is a product of this period: Kapoor has cut a gash in the inner faces of two stones and filled it with deep red pigment. The gash continues along the front of the wall where the stones come together to form a V. The deep red colour emphasizes the organic element. The title of the work calls up numerous images before our inner eye and points to an interpretation.
In Anish Kapoor’s universe there are many black holes. One of the highlights of documenta IX was Kapoor’s room “Descent into Limbo” (1992): In the middle of a walk-in cube a seemingly bottomless black hole opened up in the floor and literally dragged the viewer into itself. A new version of this work will be found in the Martin-Gropius-Bau.
Kapoor’s concave or convex mirror structures stand the world on its head. In the reflection of the brightly polished surfaces the viewer sees a distorted vision of himself and the room. The gleaming high-grade steel mirrors causes the natural order of time and space to fall apart, and the viewer is left to fend for himself. In “Vertigo” (2008) several perspectives appear simultaneously in one reflection. The visitor sees himself in close-up as though through a spectacle lens and at the same time from a great distance. What all his mirror objects have in common is a play with perception. Despite their minimalism they never seem to be hermetically sealed, but open and accessible. They invite the viewer to enter a modern wonderland, thus making him an actor.
When he comes to Kapoor’s wax works the persevering viewer will find himself observing a perpetually changing object. Because of its malleability wax lends itself to designing spontaneous ideas for sculptures and has long been used in sculpture for modelling designs, making impressions, and casting moulds. Kapoor divests the material of its pallor and places it at the centre of his sculptural idea.
Kapoor does not fit into any ready-made category. It is typical of him that each newly created work redefines the relationship between painting, sculpture and architecture. For the atrium of the exhibition gallery, which is built in Neorenaissance style, Kapoor is designing a new sculpture whose form and materiality will only be revealed at the opening. It will be in the tradition of El Lissitzky, the great Russian Constructivist, who worked out a series of lithographies in the 1920s for a re-performance of Malevich’s famous opera “Victory over the Sun” (première 1913). In “Proun” (the Russian abbreviation of “Project for the Affirmation of the New”) El Lissitzky invented a new world which he himself described as a “way station on the road from painting to architecture”.

http://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/aktuell/festivals/gropiusbau/archiv_mgb/mgb_archiv_ausstellungen/veranstaltungsdetail_mgb_ausstellungen_56920.php




SYMPHONY FOR A BELOWED SUN 2013
Mixed Media - Dimensions variable
Installation View: Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2013
Photo: Jens Ziehe - Courtesy the Artist
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013










SYMPHONY FOR A BELOWED SUN 2013
Mixed Media - Dimensions Variable
Installation View: Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2013
Photo by Jansch - Courtesy the Artist
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013










SYMPHONY FOR A BELOWED SUN 2013
Mixed Media - Dimensions variable
Installation View: Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2013
Photo: Jens Ziehe - Courtesy the Artist
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013






FROM LEFT TO RIGHT
a) Non-Object (Oval Twist), 2013
Stainless Steel
Dimensions: 250 x 128 x 150 cm
Courtesy the Artist and Lisson Gallery
b) Non-Object (Door), 2008
Stainless Steel
Dimensions: 281.3 x 118.1 x 118.1 cm
Courtesy the Artist and Gladstone Gallery
c) Non-Object (Square Twist), 2013
Stainless Steel
Dimensions: 250 X 144 X 100 cm
Courtesy the Artist and Gladstone Gallery
Installation view: Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2013
Photo: Jens Ziehe
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013
















MARTIN – GROPIUS – BAU BERLIN




THE MARTIN-GROPIUS-BAU BERLIN
The architects Martin Gropius and Heino Schmieden originally built the house in the Renaissance style as an arts and crafts museum. It was ceremoniously opened in 1881. The Museum of Prehistory and Early History and the East Asian Art Collection moved into the building after the First World War, while the arts and crafts collection was transferred to the City Palace (Stadtschloss). The building was severely damaged in 1945 during the last weeks of World War II. It wasn’t until 1966 that it was classified as a historical monument. Reconstruction began in 1978 under the direction of the architects Winnetou Kampmann and Ute Weström. The house was named after Martin Gropius, a great uncle of Walter Gropius, who had strongly urged that the museum should be rebuilt.
Since its meticulous restoration in the 1970s the Martin-Gropius-Bau has become one of the most famous and most beautiful exhibition halls in Germany. Many international exhibitions have since found a fitting venue there. Many millions of visitors have seen the exhibitions in the Martin-Gropius-Bau. The house was further restored in 1999/2000 with funding from the federal government. Air-conditioning was installed and the north entrance was redesigned as the main entrance. The architectural office of Hilmer & Sattler & Albrecht was in charge of the reconstruction.
http://www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/aktuell/festivals/gropiusbau/ueber_uns_mgb/das_haus_mgb/geschichte.php












MARTIN – GROPIUS – BAU BERLIN










ANISH KAPOOR. THE ARTIST IN THE ECHOCHAMBER OF HISTORY
WRITING BY CURATOR NORMAN ROSENTHAL
I will drench the land with your flowing blood all the way to the mountains(Ezekiel, 32. 6) Form, not color, is generally thought to be the prime aspect of sculpture. When color is applied as in ancient times to great monuments or, more recently, in contemporary sculpture in the case of, say, painted steel, it is still shape and three-dimensionality that give sculpture its essential identity. For Anish Kapoor, however, color is a fundamental element – essential to the aesthetic perception of the form. Kapoor’s earliest works, for example the fragile piles of red, yellow, and blue pigment known as 1000 Names (1979—1980) – miniaturized sacred mounds – speak in their essence of the mystical meaning of color. In this there is some thing of Wassily Kandinsky who, in his famous tract concerning the spiritual in art from 1912, proclaimed that color “is a power which directly influences the soul.” [1] But Kandinsky of course was a painter, not a sculptor.
Kapoor has made spectacular public works for open air and museum spaces, sensitive to the site and often on an immense scale. Shooting into the Corner (2008–2009), Leviathan(2011), and Svayambh (2007), the title of which is Sanskrit for ‘born by itself’ and which consists of a train carriage covered in blood-red wax moving on tracks through the gallery , are among his most impressive and shocking sculptures of recent years. In these three works, the turning of all nature to red is a project of endless possibility, from the savage and the tortured, to the sublime and the triumphant. Thought of together, they evoke the powerful poem by Charles Baudelaire, “Le Fontaine du Sang” (1868), from Les Fleurs du Mal: It seems to me at times my blood flows out in waves / Like a fountain that gushes in rhythmical sobs. / I hear it clearly, escaping with long murmurs, / But I feel my body / in vain to find the wound. Across the city, as in a tournament field, / It courses, making islands of the paving stones, / Satisfying the thirst of every creature / And turning the colour of all nature to red.[2]
Kapoor conveys the inherent symbolic power of color as essence, material, and readymade.
Over the years he has imagined and realized an economy of means in countless ways, always with an under standing of the necessity to achieve form that expresses the material’s essence. This says much about his ability to communicate using, in a fundamentally abstract language, these three elements: color, form, and material. With these means he achieves a wide range of sometimes self-evident, but also personal, hidden, and secret meanings. It is the purpose of this essay to offer clues and connections to a body of work built up over a period of more than three decades, an endlessly inventive ‘theater of sculpture’ of which this exhibition, Kapoor in Berlin, is a highly significant stage. Kapoor’s art encompasses the aesthetics of shock and surprise, but equally that of the sublime and the quiet. It also exemplifies specific dualities: the pure and the messy; the smooth and the rough; the void and the dense; the tranquil and the noisy; the implicitly sexual and the chaste. Often these dualities are present within a single work. Moving through a large exhibition such as this we find the artist inventing spectacular pieces onto which we are forced to project and reflect, drawing on our experience and imagination to interpret the essential forms and colors. Over the years Kapoor’s evolving work has explored the distinct and inherent qualities of color – initially the primaries, blue, yellow, red; more recently he has become happy to explore more complex colors within which to saturate the viewer. At the same time he has allowed red to occupy a central position in his oeuvre – as the many works in this exhibition testify, notably the works in wax. It is a deep, visceral, powerfully associative red color. Kapoor’s wax is not colored red but is redness embodied. It is also always tending to form – it never assumes a form that is fixed.
In Symphony for a Beloved Sun (2013), the great environment that dominates Kapoor’s atrium at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, red wax piles up, as if suggesting disaster, yet the sun could perhaps be snatching back victory from defeat. Its title evokes the haunting final line of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghostsin which Mrs Alving’s dying syphilitic son Oswald asks, “Mother, give me the sun.” In this piece Kapoor is, inevitably, challenging the memory of Joseph Beuys from the legendary exhibition Zeitgeist of 1982. This was only the second exhibition in the Martin-Gropius-Bau to take place after its restoration, following near destruction during World War II – and one which the author of this essay had the privilege of being a co-curator. Beuys was asked to occupy the museum’s central atrium.
He choose to bring with him the entire contents of his Düsseldorf studio – from the work benches to chairs as well as his individual sculptural tools. Each of these tools he wrapped in clay to form what he termed the Lehmlinge. In a part of the atrium Beuys constructed a six-meter-high Berlin clay mountain, around which gathered the studio furniture and tools.
Into all these he had transmuted animalistic spirits. For those willing to enter the poetics and historical background of the environment it be - came a magical, even immortal image. Like Beuys, in Symphony for a Beloved Sun Kapoor is attempting to make both a theatrical and sculptural environment of near and distant resonances, acknowledging the building’s art and historical memories, and more widely those of Berlin. This new environment of Kapoor’s, with its rising bands conveying red wax that drops off gradually to build piles on the floor, resonates with those modernist theatrical productions that took place in the city in the 1920s and early 1930s. Such stage sets are symbolic of the cultural and political history of their period – in - cluding the good, bad, and terrifying – yet also suggest a triumph of the sun over the industrialized bloody mass murders that have emanated, not only out of Berlin, but throughout the world of the last hundred years and more. Red is the color of blood, the color of triumph, of love, of the rising sun and its setting. The sun was among the greatest deities of ancient Egypt – think of the rebel pharaoh, Akhenaten. Apollo is the all-powerful sun god of Ancient Greece – the god of light, color, and truth, and the embodiment of art and culture in general.
And by your shores I saw the cities bloom, The noble cities, where industry keeps silent in the workplace, Saw knowledge, where your sun Gently enlightens the artist to be earnest.
Sometimes color is presented as the essence of the form, sometimes it is embedded in a more pictorial but still essential fashion. Kapoor’s mirrors act like paintings; their substance and their reflected imagery are one and the same thing. The silver mirrored piece Vertigo (2006), when situated in an English landscape, becomes as it were, the equivalent of an English landscape painting by Constable or Turner. We might regard his strategy as aspiring to hold fast rock or cloud formations in which human faces or animal forms can be perceived. They could also recall Hermann Rorschach and his inkblots, which, in psycho logical tests, provide any number of different responses, consciously or unconsciously expressed. However, where the Rorschach test has in tended medical application, the perceptual response to a Kapoor sculpture, regardless of the distance from the artist’s hand, is purely aesthetic. Kapoor’s work occupies spaces within and without physical and mental space, a stream of culturally infused visual shocks.




Mirrors as objects in themselves have accrued an extraordinary cultural history: from Narcissus onwards, they have functioned as poetic and metaphorical devices, holding up a mimetic appearance of reality, “Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.”[4] Mirrors, too, when formed as convexes or concaves, or fractured in endless ways, can arouse astonishing, even miraculous effects that baffle our initial sense of logic. These senses Kapoor loves to explore for sublime and sometimes even comic ends. In German literature, the Narrenspiegel and the equally famous character Till Eulenspiegel are longrecognized examples of the inherently comic ‘illusion’ of existence as evidenced by the mystery of the mirror.
All cultures have seen the essence, even the keys, of creation itself reflected back in the mirror. In the Newtonian scientific age that has ruled our sense of logic, in which everything is inherently explicable, explanations nonetheless do not take away from a sense of surprise when con - front ing reflection effects in mirrors.
Parabolic surfaces gather energy and are capable of receiving light and sound in ways that can be ghostly or energetically expansive, depending on the size and complexity of each structure. The fascination of the mirror is that it indeed functions as an echo of the universe. This sense of magic that has resulted from Kapoor’s play with mirrors achieves a high moment in the spectacular Cloud Gate in Chicago. In such a
cityscape, the reflections might make us recall Vermeer’s painted view of Delft Further - more it has become a symbol of the city as much as the Brandenburg Gate, surmounted by the figure of Victory facing East and with its own long and complex history, has become the symbol of Berlin.
The complex engineered beauty of Cloud Gate, however, through its wondrous parabolic shape, is that it faces all directions and at the same time none. It creates the impression of a city as a warped, fluid space – as though each man and woman becomes a reflection of their own interior landscape – as well as being suggestive of the male and female sex. Great paintings in the Western tradition are so often to be perceived as mirrors – the Arnolfini portrait couple, Velasquez’s Las Meninas, and Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère are all about the ambiguity of mirrors and the interplay between the imaginary and the real. It is Kapoor’s particular achievement, in an ongoing series of investigations, to examine aesthetically the ambiguities of the mirror itself. The mirror, too, can reflect the sublime, as already suggested. When constructed by Kapoor, refracting tens of thousands of tiny fragments, all mathematically engineered into a single concave plane, the viewer fragments as if becoming, for the glancing moment, a cubist figure shattered almost beyond recognition. In other cases reversals or inversions take place that seem to defy all logic and common sense. Confronting again one of his geometrically fragmented monumental mirrors, the carved 20 ceilings and tiles of the Alhambra come to mind, the intricate reflected patterns of which could only be created through advanced mathematical science.
Between the tenth and the fifteenth centuries, during which time the Alhambra was built, this knowledge was available to Arab scholars alone – scholars who were able to project an extraordinary illusion of infinity, suggestive of the autonomous hand of God, who not only controls but ultimately allows a sense of order, and wonder, into the world. The aesthetic power of pattern and ornament, translated into contemporary techniques and insights, plays an equally vital role in the art of Kapoor.
Ernst Gombrich in A Sense of Order quotes The Seven Lamps of Architecture by Victorian art critic John Ruskin: there is not a cluster of weeds growing in any cranny of ruin which has not a beauty in all respects nearly equal, and, in some, immeasurably superior, to that of the most elaborate sculpture of its stones [i.e. the sculptural building itself]: and that all our interest in the carved work, our sense of its richness, though it is tenfold less rich than the knots of grass beside it; of its delicacy, though it is a thousandfold less delicate ... results from our consciousness of it being the work of poor, clumsy, toilsome man. [5] Ruskin was writing in the nineteenth century, at a moment when the possibilities of the machine to duplicate and make more efficient the work of man were all too apparent. What he was unable to envisage, however, was the aesthetic consequences of an artistic practice that does not merely imitate nature – imitation of nature is something that artists have, in fact, strived for since the beginning of time. Kapoor’s genius is in devising strategies, inventing machines, or otherwise setting in motion the conditions of fictive creation that appear to do what nature does, to create the effect not only of replication but also of its processes, in order to achieve an equivalent of what Ruskin looked for in his tuft of grass, in a vast rock formation, in a shell, or in a spectacular cave of stalactites. Each of Kapoor’s works, in a highly calibrated way, appeals to our powers of abstract and figurative perception. Of course, at one level all art aspires to this, as the significance of form strives to balance with meaning, and even the great masters of Abstract Expressionism – Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and so on – were particularly conscious of this imperative of art. Kapoor – deeply sensitive to cultural history, psychology, and the drive to metaphor – has a mastery of abstraction based on knowledge and instinct for the possibilities that lie dormant within the materials he uses.




In Shooting into the Corner a cannon fires heavy pellets of red wax into the far corner of a room, making out of the scattered wax a blood-like stained environment. It is a kind of threedimensional equivalent of action painting: the work’s final out - come is unpredictable and the space becomes a noisy battlefield like the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, but also in fact like a world of modern violence and warfare. Materiality and indeed science (Wissenschaft) lie at the heart of Kapoor’s creative processes. They are part of the wonderment that his art occasions for those who engage with it – including the artist himself. For materials, as they submit themselves to the laws of physics in the context of sculpture, do strange and surprising things; materials behave evermore paradoxically as they submit to new technologies and new artistic insights. He plays with a wide repertory of materials: alabaster, earth, steel and other metals, concrete, wax, and plastics of many different kinds. Young Goethe wrote in 1776 of a now little-known eighteenth century French Rococo sculptor, Etienne Maurice Falconet – an artist who could hardly be further away from the spirit of Kapoor’s world, but who represented for Goethe the transformative magic of the artist: this transparency in the marble which produces the harmony itself, does it not inspire in the artist that soft and subtle gradation which he then applies to his own works? Will not plaster, on the other hand, deprive him of a source of those harmonies which so enhance painting and sculpture? … No more does the sculptor look for harmony in his material; rather he puts it there, if he can see it in nature, and he can see it just as well in plaster as in marble … Why is nature always beautiful, and beautiful everywhere? And meaningful everywhere? And eloquent! And with marble and plaster, why do they need such a special light? Isn’t it
because nature is in continual movement, continually created afresh, and marble, the most lively material, is always dead matter? It can only be saved from its life lessness by the magic wand of lighting.
Falconet, who originally made models for the Sevres porcelain manufactory, was later
summoned by Catharine the Great to St. Petersburg to design the statue of Peter the Great, famous thanks to Pushkin’s poem The Bronze Horseman. Falconet’s sculpture became, like Cloud Gate and like the Brandenburg Gate, the great symbol of a city. A century – and that city young, Gem of the Northern world, amazing, From gloomy wood and swamp upsprung, Had risen, in pride and splendour blazing.
Can momentous historical events and memories be translated into the category of art without banality? Once again we can take a clue from Baudelaire, who understood that art, as well as making any critique or comment, is the glory of expressing what one dreams, [8] the only way to find a moral equivalent to the realities of human history, whether through painting or sculpture. Kapoor makes possible a phenomenal fusion of both, as though they were almost one thing, achieving a synthesis that balances analysis on one hand and imagination on the other. As Baudelaire puts it: “Imagination is the queen of truth, and the possible is one of the provinces of truth. It has a positive relationship with the infinite.”[9]




Kapoor’s hand is visible in traditional techniques, such as carving and casting, but he also harnesses technology to make giant sculptures that appear to come about miraculously, as though by themselves. These can look like ancient cities uncovered by archaeologists, but now these cement sculptures resemble body parts of huge, Cyclopean figures come down to us from mythic times. Kapoor, with out his hand directly involved, yet with his imagination fully in control, contrives to allow the cement to flow like natural lava, or like meat through a mincer, producing ever more fantastical shapes. One might describe these objects as being produced by the hand of God – quite literally the deus ex machina. Some might argue that a distanced, and alienated, machine is incapable of making an artwork, and that only the human hand can fashion one, even allowing for accidents of the ‘unfinished’, as perfected by Michelangelo in sculpture and Cezanne in painting.
But Kapoor’s concept of the controlled ‘unfinished’ produced by his machine is something new again, relating to the idea of the autogeneration of the artwork that goes right back to his early pigment works. In spite of the imperative of discovery and surprise the Western art world demands, art nonetheless has to act as a repository of memory, like the Mnemosyne of Greek mythology, who gave birth to all the nine muses, themselves repositories of memories – historical, cultural, and scientific. Gombrich, in his biography of Aby Warburg, that famous constructor of visual cultural memory, quotes his hero, who defines the idea of ‘distance’ or ‘detachment’ as a condition of civilization in art and in thought: “The conscious creation of distance between the self 26 and the external world may be called the fundamental act of civilization. Where this gap conditions artistic creativity, this awareness of distance can achieve a lasting social function.”[10] The lasting social function resides primarily in mental processes, the nuanced ambiguities and ambivalences that art, relying on our memories, achieves while pushing the game forward. In all that is produced in Kapoor’s studio, in all the sculpture that before our eyes appears to generate itself, new possibilities are constantly opening up. The paradoxically wondrous thing in the case of Anish Kapoor is that each work, even as it resembles the processes and results of nature and science or as it automatically self creates, is stylistically identifiable as coming from this artist alone. Red life burns through my veins, the brown earth shifts under my feet, with glowing love I hug the trees and the marble images, which spring to life in my embrace.






UNTITLED 2010
Wax, Oil Based Paint and Steel
Dimensions: 135.5 x 135.5 x 222.5 cm
Installation view: Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, 2010
Photo: Markus Tretter
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013




STACK 2007 & UNTITLED 2010
Wax, Oil Based Paint, Mixed Media, Dimensions Variable
Installation View: Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2013
Photo: Jansch - Courtesy the Artist
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013












UP DOWN SHADOW 2005
Wood and Wax
Dimensions: 172 x 172 x 101.5 cm
 Courtesy the Artist
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013




THE DEATH OF LEVIATHAN 2011-2013
P.V.C - Dimensions Variable
Installation View: Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2013
Photo: Jens Ziehe
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013




STACK 2007 ( DETAIL )






STACK 2007
Forklift Truck, Wax and Oil-Based Paint
Dimensions: 510 x 105 x 225 cm
Photo: Dave Morgan
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013




WOUND 1988
Stone & Pigment
Dimensions: 310 x 475 x 394 cm
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013




1ST BODY 2013
Resin - Dimensions Variable
Installation view: Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2013
Photo: Jens Ziehe - Courtesy the Artist and Lisson Gallery
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013








WHEN I AM PREGNANT 1992
Fibreglass, Wood, Paint
Dimensions: 180,5 x 180,5 x 43 cm
Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013




Installation View: Gladstone Gallery, 2012
Photo: David Regen
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013




SHOOTING INTO THE CORNER 2008-2009
Mixed Media - Dimensions Variable
Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013








SHOOTING INTO THE CORNER 2008-2009
Mixed Media - Dimensions Variable
Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013




SHOOTING INTO THE CORNER 2008-2009
Mixed Media - Dimensions Variable
Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013






APOCALYPSE & THE MILLENNIUM 2013
Resin and Earth
Dimensions: 270 x 450 x 395 cm
Installation view: Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2013
Photo: Jens Ziehe - Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery
© Anish Kapoor / VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013
























ANISH KAPOOR
12 March 1954 Born in Mumbai, India. Kapoor spends his childhood in Mumbai
and his youth at the well-known boarding school The Doon School in Dehradun.
1970–1973 At the age of 16, he moves to Israel to live on a kibbutz. After
six months he quits his studies of electrical engineering and decides to become an artist. He soon attains international renown with his sculptures made of pigments.
1973 Travels to the UK to study at the Hornsey College of Art in London and then at the Chelsea College of Art and Design.
1979 Teaches at the Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the U.K. That same year, he travels to India, where he is enchanted by the vibrant powdered pigments he sees everywhere, from temples to market stands. He soon begins to create sculptures coated with colour-saturated pigments.
1982 Becomes Artist in Residence at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and later exhibits at the Lisson Gallery in London. He is part of the movement that would later become famous as New British Sculpture.
1990 Represents Britain in the Biennale in Venice, and in 1992 in documenta IX in Kassel.
1991 Awarded the Turner Prize.
1996 Creates an altar of black Irish limestone for the Frauenkirche in Dresden; the altar is located in the lowest point of the church, at the apex of the cruciform barrel vault.
2002 The installation Marsyas is displayed in Tate Modern’s türbine hall in London.
2003 The Kunsthaus Bregenz exhibits My Red Homeland, a 20-tonne sculpture of red vaseline and wax Press kit: Kapoor in Berlin page 6
2004 Anish Kapoor creates the installation Cloud Gate at the Millennium Park in Chicago, a monumental 110-tonne polished stainless steel sculpture.
2008 Conceptualizes the steel sculpture Memory for the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.
2009 Presents the installation Shooting into the Corner at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (MAK) in Vienna. That same year, the Royal Academy in London devotes an extensive solo exhibition to Kapoor.
2011 His work Leviathan is exhibited at the Grand Palais in Paris as part of the annual Monumenta. Works by Kapoor are on display simultaneously at two exhibition venues in Milan: the Rotonda di Via Besana and the Fabbrica del Vapore. In October, Kapoor is awarded the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo.
2012 On the occasion of the London Olympics, Kapoor creates the
Arcelor Mittal Orbit, a tower 115 metres high.
Anish Kapoor is a member of the Royal Academy and a Commander of the British
Empire (CBE).