HONG KONG.- Gagosian Gallery is presenting Anish Kapoor’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Hong Kong.
In sculptures made during the last ten years, the primacy of materials and their qualities in Kapoor’s process is revealed, whereby worlds are created in which geometric formulae are filled and emptied in three dimensions. Minerals in rare hues and highly polished metals provide his anthropomorphic forms with an ineluctable opulence.
In his monumental sculptural practice, Kapoor conflates concave and convex, inside and outside, upright and inverted. In the works in the exhibition, he explores and achieves the same tensions on a more intimate scale. Nestled in corners or placed on the floor, these sculptures feel almost familiar. Viewers entering the gallery share their space and their gravity. Yet, despite the appeal of their colors and textures, and the intimation of their weight, the sculptures resist approach. Curved mirrors of stainless steel and aluminum, mounted on the wall or free-standing, distort the viewer’s reflection and unsettle, or even liquefy, the slabs of carved stone that rest solidly on the floor. The effect is one of incomprehensibility without apparent reason—as if the rules of physics are being broken, but there is no way to prove it.
In Gossamer (2015), a large piece of pink onyx finely carved into a stretched ellipse, the inward-curving hole at the center creates the illusion of a deepening void. In a display of material mastery, Kapoor generates the same sensation in surfaces as disparate as cloudy gray alabaster and dazzling fiberglass and gold. Whether encountering the dark seams of Kapoor’s forms folding in on themselves, or, as is with Vertigo (2006), one’s own reflection is multiplied within a warped architecture, there is a consistent sense of having entered a space that is at once natural, artificial, and alchemical.
Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai, and lives and works in London. His work is featured in public collections including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; Tate Britain; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Selected solo institutional exhibitions include “Anish Kapoor: Marsyas,” Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London (2002); “My Red Homeland,” Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2003, traveled to Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Malaga, Spain in 2006); “Anish Kapoor: Ascension,” Centro Cultural Banco Do Brasil, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil (2006, traveled to Centro Cultural Banco Do Brasil, Brasilia; Centro Cultural Banco Do Brasil, São Paulo); Sky Mirror, Public Art Fund, Rockefeller Center, New York (2006); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2007); “Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2008); “Anish Kapoor: Memory,” Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2008, traveled to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2009); National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (2010); Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2010); “MONUMENTA 2011: Leviathan,” Grand Palais, Paris (2011); Leeum—Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2012); Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul (2013); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2013); and Chateau de Versailles, France (2015).
“Anish Kapoor. Archaelogy: Biology” is currently on view at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico until November 27, 2016.
Public commissions include Cloud Gate Millennium Park, Chicago (2004); and Turning the World Upside Down, Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2010). ArcelorMittal Orbit (2012) is permanently installed at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London.
