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.
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”.
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 Ghosts, in 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.
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
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
.jpg)
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
