Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor is a distinguished British-Indian sculptor who focuses his skillful practice in conceptual art and transformative installations. The London-based luminary was born in Mumbai, and attended the prestigious Doon boarding school. Upon moving to the UK, Kapoor sharpened his innate artistic capabilities at Hornsey College of Art, and eventually furthered his education at Chelsea School of Art and Design.
Throughout the 1980s, Kapoor’s biomorphic and geometric sculptures became a trademark style, revealing his deft creativity with lush materials such as marble, granite, limestone, plaster, and pigment. These works led to a rich investigation of matter and non-matter, resulting in autonomous, architectural installations and works of art. The mid-90s brought about Kapoor’s quest with polished stainless steel, developing pieces with sleek, mirror surfaces which challenge perceptions and offer ethereal new perspectives.
Red wax has become a signature material in the luminary’s oeuvre, evoking organic metamorphosis. In 2007 at the Nantes Musée des Beaux-Arts, on the occasion of the Biennale Estuaire, his moving work Svayambh was unveiled as a 1.5 meter block made up of red wax which traversed the museum. The enthralling creation made an additional appearance at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, as well as at the Royal Academy in London in 2009. Brilliantly erasing the borders between art and architecture, Kapoor raised the curtain on Memory in 2008 at New York’s Guggenheim Foundation. His inaugural work of steel which generates a rust coating weighs 24 tons, is composed of a captivating 156 elements, and immerses audiences in an unappalled realm of uncertainty and wonder.
Recently, in 2022, the Gallerie dell’Accademia and Palazzo Manfrin presented a dual exhibition of retrospective and new work by Kapoor in Venice. The show, curated by art historian Taco Dibbits, began at the Gallerie with a seminal body of early pigment sculptures, 1000 Names (1979-1980), and “void” works created with “Kapoor Black,” a nanotechnology substance so dark that it absorbs more than 99.9% of visible light. The riveting motif of an object’s skin as veil between the inner and outer worlds was further explored with the site-specific Pregnant White Within Me (2022), a giant bulge which distended the gallery and was accompanied by various sacrilegious acts on the part of Kapoor. As he shot at and cut into the walls, he turned the hallowed fabric of the building inside out.
The theme continued with the site-specific Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022), a pendulous, painted mass of silicone protruding from the ceiling of the Palazzo’s entrance hall. It preluded a series of early and recent works in silicone, mirror, and pigment which displaced and distorted the viewer’s expectations of the object before the eyes, embodying darkness, emptiness, and reflection as physical realities.
