Anish Kapoor
British-Indian Sculptor, Painter, and Installation Artist
Mumbai, India
Summary of Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor transformed the cool, conceptual, and minimal approach to sculpture by adding lyricism, metaphor, and the heat of the primordial. Objects spill out from their own parameters suggesting an excess of emotion, yet they also stand serenely as in meditative focus for ritual. Typically, the sculptures appear abstract, with Kapoor's intention to promote self-reflection made most obvious when using mirrored surfaces. He does not wish to present a prescriptive idea, but instead to create an environment within which people themselves can consider meaning. As the viewer becomes part of the sculpture, each work speaks of the confined individuality of a single body, but also of the expansive inclusiveness of a shared place. At once celestial and earthy, art by Kapoor evokes untouchable far away planets alongside the soft warmth of a close pregnant belly. His sculptures paradoxically entwine esoteric philosophy with sensual everyday experience.
Accomplishments
- Like sculptors of the same generation, including Richard Serra and Antony Gormley, Kapoor asks his audience to consider how they exist in and move through space. His public works are at once graceful and imposing, raising the question of how human presence impacts upon the natural environment as he seeks to create a respectful and interesting relationship between the two.
- Kapoor repeatedly returns to the notion of origin. Although not explicit, the beginning of life is constantly referenced. Kapoor makes holes, often vulva-like, and curves to illustrate pregnancy, as the journey towards birth from our mother's womb is highlighted. Red becomes the color of blood, the body, and the initiation of life's journey.
- Kapoor's interest in infinity, void, and endlessness is as much an interest in carving out space to consider meaning, as it is a reflection on the state of no-thing-ness, and a clearing of the mind. The color black, like an abyss in the cosmos, signifies an opening for new and unpredictable experiences and presents limitless opportunity for self-development and contemplation.
- His is a particularly international body of work, with momentous public sculptures placed as icons all around the globe. Kapoor gives the world a way to speak without words; like the ancient cave painters and the Egyptian's before them, artists recognize that there is a way to communicate in which everyone can understand. Kapoor builds a pictorial language of symbols that translates across cultures and time.
- Viewed from above, Kapoor's pigment sculptures become painterly. They transform to recall Constructivist and Suprematist canvases by Kazimir Malevich as well as abstract paintings by Paul Klee. In this sense, Kapoor achieves a typical artist's goal, to unite metaphysical dualities including light and dark, earth and sky, mind and body, male and female, and in this case, painting and sculpture.
Progression of Art
1000 Names
Inspired by the rich colors of India and embracing his Eastern heritage, Kapoor used saturated pigment and geometric shapes to create groupings of sculptures that were strikingly simplistic. Kapoor worked on such sculptures throughout the 1980s and decided that as each and every piece was somehow related to the next, he would give them all a generic title of 1000 Names, to suggest infinity. The series consisted of arrangements of monochromatic objects set on the ground or hung from the walls. Inspired by sculptor Anthony Caro's removal of the plinth, Kapoor placed his geometric sculptures directly on the ground, as an integrated part of their surrounding environment. In a performance influenced by his time at art school, Kapoor ritualistically laid loose pigment in red, white, yellow, and blue over the simple forms, with the pigments eventually spilling beyond the objects themselves and onto the floor or wall. As Kapoor explains, "1000 Names implies that the objects are part of a much bigger whole. The objects seem to be coming out of the ground or the wall, the powder defining a surface, implying that there is something below the surface, like an iceberg poking out of the subconscious." These early sculptures are the first works in which Kapoor began to manipulate the viewer's perception of space and form.
Although at this point still relatively small, built to fit the gallery environment, Kapoor's sculptures are architectural. The shapes recall pyramids, temples and skyscrapers, but also paradoxically - incense cones and candles. There is a union of the sacred and the profane, the social and the domestic at work, and also a meeting of the mind and the body. However uplifting spiritually and apparently meditative in tone, other works by the artist confirm that he is as equally concerned with the bodily.
When Kapoor returns 30 years later to pigment work, but on a much larger-scale in Dismemberment of Jeanne d'Arc (2009), connection to flesh is made more obvious through Kapoor's creation of an abstract "dismembered body" of the martyred saint. Staged in a large warehouse-like space during the Brighton Festival in England, the public work consisted of two colossal breasts, two outstretched limbs, and a pit signifying a womb and female genitalia. The mounds and pit were then covered in red powdered pigment to evoke Joan's naked, bloody, and tortured body. Dismemberment of Jeanne d'Arc helps to highlight the fact that however minimal, 1000 Names speaks of a path to enlightenment that marries ethereal musings with the importance of flesh.
Wood, gesso, and pure pigment - Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain
Void Field
Having made a name for himself with his pigment pieces, controversy soon followed Kapoor as he was selected to represent Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale while still officially an Indian citizen. Aware of the cultural and historical clashes between the East and the West, he created Void Field, a work that quite explicitly both highlights and soothes the dichotomy. By combining British stone and Indian pigment, he marries his roots and wings. Consisting of 16 large, roughly cut Northumbrian sandstone blocks, Kapoor carefully carved holes in each one, filling them with a deep powdered black pigment. The result is at once womb-like and celestial, making reference to the space where we all once were, and also to a mystery place where we will never get to go.
The presence of the artist's hand is a subtle intervention engaged with the power of nature felt strongly, aligning Kapoor's piece to works by his contemporary Antony Gormley, and also to the more explicit land artist, Richard Long. Furthermore, the act of bringing the stones into the display pavilion in 1990, which interestingly, had been built in 1887 during British colonial rule of India, was seen as a subversive gesture since the heavy stones were costly to move and required the building's floor to be reinforced. Overall, Kapoor understood that Venice was a fitting site to display this particular work because as Henry Meyric Hughes, art historian and British Commissioner for the Venice Biennale in 1990 explains, "Venice is an interchange of East and West [and reflects] the way Kapoor borrows from both cultures."
To focus too strongly on nationality in exploration of Kapoor's work would be a mistake as he is ultimately interested in the sameness of the human condition irreverent of background. The artist himself says, "I am Indian but to see everything in terms of nationality is limiting. I don't see myself as an Indian artist; neither do I see myself as a British artist. I am an artist who works in Britain. The work has to be looked at from as wide a base as possible." In response to this work, and to his efforts at the Biennale, Kapoor was awarded the Premio Duemila for a Work of a Young Artist under 35.
16 sandstone blocks and pure blue pigment - Venice Biennale, 1990
When I am Pregnant
Revealing itself only when viewed in profile, When I am Pregnant, consists simply of a white bulge protruding seamlessly from the gallery's white wall. The seamlessness of the sculpture's protrusion allows it to be simultaneously its own entity and part of the entire wall, at once a body and a piece of architecture. Depicting a pregnant belly extending from the fabric of the building, Kapoor reveals once again that however minimalist his sculptures may first appear, that they are in fact always interested in the complex deeper meanings of how and why life is created and born. There is also the sense here that making art is itself an act similar to the experience of pregnancy; the artist conceives an idea and then they live and grow with this idea, until it has become ripe and ready to be born. At this point, the artwork (or the child) is guided into the world, and the creator must let go, which can in both scenarios be an intensely difficult process.
Later, Kapoor would continue to explore the same theme and begin to make works that are the inversion of When I am Pregnant. Yellow (1999) for example, is a large, concave wall piece painted a bright, saturated yellow, creating a sunny, circular void seamlessly within the gallery wall. Pregnancy and womb related images featured in the earlier years also, including the series referring to Mother as Mountain (1985), and later Madonna (1989-90). This is a recurring interest for Kapoor, one shared by other contemporary sculptors, including Juan Munoz and Damien Hirst. It has also been said that When I Am Pregnant is part of a continuing exploration of Kapoor's ideas surrounding what constitutes nothingness and substance. "The idea that if I empty out all the content and just make something that is an empty form, I don't empty out the content at all. The content is there in a way that is more surprising than if I tried to make a content."
Fiberglass and paint - Du Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, Netherlands
Sky Mirror
Commissioned by the Nottingham Playhouse in England, Kapoor's first Sky Mirror is a public sculpture consisting of a 20-foot-wide concave dish angled upwards towards the transient sky. Turning the world upside down, he alters perspective and asks the audience to think differently. The polished, stainless steel surface, planted firmly on earth provides a porthole to watch the ever-changing and passing clouds. By moving away from pigment and stone, to using mirrored surfaces to make his work, Kapoor makes it more obvious that he wants his viewer to reflect upon her surroundings and herself. It is the artist's intension that the audience contemplates the work by becoming a part of it. Kapoor himself refers to the work as a "non-object" because its reflective surface allows the sculpture to disappear within its surroundings.
Inspired by the realistically depicted landscapes of Romantic painter, John Constable, Sky Mirror is a conceptual variation of a landscape painting. Like Constable, who believed no two days were alike and tasked himself with capturing the daily variations of the landscape in his work, the self-generating Sky Mirror is a continuously-changing view of a landscape. It is also entirely part of the environment in which it is placed; thus boundaries between things and people are broken down as everything begins to connect to, and to impact on, everything else.
The public's general love of Sky Mirror, encouraging much-needed self-reflection, has generated demand for Kapoor's mirrored sculptures in many cities around the world. Always determined and inclined to push his abilities, Kapoor constructed a colossal 35-foot version of Sky Mirror at the Rockefeller Center in New York City in 2006. Exemplifying that which makes Kapoor's work so popular among everyday people, however profound, these sculptures are easily accessible and gently introduce what can otherwise be a heavy endeavor, a process of becoming more self-aware. One cannot also - humorously and with a hint of science fiction - help but look forward to and imagine a time when one can enter a Sky Mirror in Nottingham and exit it in New York City. There is an element of the otherworldly at work in such Kapoor creations.
Concave mirror made of polished stainless steel - Nottingham Playhouse, Nottingham, England
Marsyas
While the Venice Biennale brought Kapoor international acclaim, it was his sculpture for the Tate Modern in London that is considered his most celebrated work of art, and one of Kapoor's first massive-scale sculptures. Marsyas, named after the ancient Greek satyr who was an expert on the double pipe instrument known as the aulos, consisted of red PVC canvas stretched over a steel framework to create a giant, double trumpet-shaped structure. As music induces contemplation upon listening, a sculptor tries to imitate the same affect using visual stimulus. The trumpet is the instrument that most resembles a megaphone, as though an announcement will be made to command our attention. Furthermore, it also resembles a funnel and suggests scientific usage as much as it introduces visual poetry.
Situated precisely within the confines of the gigantic space, its size and positioning made it impossible for the viewer to perceive the work in its entirety from any one spot. The message seems to be that a full understanding of the work will be hard to grasp. To make a start though, the structure appears genital in nature, both vaguely phallic and very obviously similar in shape to a woman's fallopian tubes. It is through these tubes that a fertilized ovum makes its first journey to reach the womb. Indeed, the installation recalls the themes of Louise Bourgeois, who also took over the Tate Turbine Hall two years prior to Kapoor. Bourgeois situated three towers in the space, which the public could climb and then see themselves in large circular mirrors at the summit. She also included a bell jar in each tower, home to the sculpture of a mother and child. As well as the interest in origin, and in presenting mirrors for reflection to the public, Kapoor also shares Bourgeois interest in towers. In 2012 he designed, Orbit, the tower that is now part of the Olympic Park in London. Similar to Bourgeois's spiral stairs, Orbit is wrapped in woven red metal, as metaphor for the life-giving umbilical cord.
Marsyas instantly became iconic because it was the first time that any artist had filled the Tate's Turbine Hall with one massive work of art. Rather than subtly manipulating space as he had done in the past, Marsyas was Kapoor's first sculpture to utterly consume the space around it, as though somehow the artist's ideas had solidified and demanded further recognition. Understanding that the sculpture's success lies in its size, Kapoor explains, "every idea has its scale. Marsyas wouldn't be what it is if it were a third of the scale. The pyramids are the size they are because they are. Scale is a tool, a tool of sculpture."
Infatuated by notions of space and scale, Kapoor would continue to fabricate various iterations of large-scale red PVC canvas sculptures, both indoors and outdoors. In 2009, Kapoor constructed Dismemberment Site I, a permanent sculpture at Gibbs Farm in Auckland, New Zealand. Set into a recess carved out of a hill, PVC canvas was once again stretched between two steel-framed ellipses to create a double trumpet form. At almost 280 feet long and 82 feet high, the structure is an imposing sight, demonstrating how Kapoor's sculpture has become increasingly more monumental. Interestingly though, although the artist himself feels that such a size increase is essential, the idea at work (surrounding a connective understanding of human origin) is the same as that found in a small red pigment triangle or a non-intrusive pregnant wall made decades earlier. One must raise the question as to whether it is the art that needs to become huge, or if indeed, that is a separate requirement of the man.
PVC and Steel - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom
Cloud Gate
Continuing to utilize a reflective surface and large-scale, Kapoor created Cloud Gate, a site-specific sculpture located in Millennium Park in Chicago. Nicknamed "The Bean" and inspired by liquid mercury's silver color and thick viscosity, the 33 feet high by 66 feet long sculpture consists of 168-polished stainless steel panels seamlessly welded together to create the illusion of a singular object. Like his Sky Mirrors, the surface of the bean-like structure reflects an altered image of its surroundings, including the famed Chicago architecture. Visitors are encouraged to walk around and underneath the sculpture to observe the way it distorts their reflection. Encompassing a repertoire of repeated motifs, including voids, bulges, mirrored surfaces, and the manipulation of scale and space, he borrows ideas and materials from Minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd but also incorporates emotion (once again his signature pregnant belly faces the world) into the work to create a distinctive Kapoor sculpture.
Like all of the artist's large-scale sculptures, Cloud Gate was expensive and technically challenging to build. Engineers tasked with creating the sculpture first believed the design would be impossible to construct, while the projected $6 million cost ended up closer to $23 million upon completion of the project. Security guards continue to be present 24 hours a day to prevent anything from happening to the expensive object, adding to the exorbitant cost and raising further debate about the 'worth' of art when money has become so inextricably intertwined.
Stainless steel - Millennium Park, Chicago
Shooting Into the Corner
Developed with the assistance of engineers, Shooting Into the Corner consists of a pneumatic compressor constructed to resemble a cannon, which loudly shoots 24-pound balls of wax 50 mph across a room and into a corner at 20 minute intervals. Meant to evoke the fleshiness of the body, the red wax residue created upon impact drips down the walls into a suggestive congealed puddle of blood, slowly accumulating on the floor with every shot of the canon. The gesture is reminiscent of Richard Serra's Splash pieces from the 1960s, in which the artist would fling molten liquid lead against a wall. It also recalls the dramatic performances made by the Viennese Actionists during the 1960s, which often involved real raw meat.
Indeed Kapoor himself says, "the act of making a mark is violent", and the explosive aggressiveness displayed in both his and Serra's work it has been argued is inherently 'masculine' and confrontational. It is important to note though that both Marina Abramovic and Ana Mendieta worked with actually 'bloody' materials, whilst Kapoor imitates the flesh and introduces the aggressive gesture of his red wax hitting the walls. The red could equally refer to the messiness of our passage into the world as it could to blood spilt in war. Recently, perhaps symptomatic of a political moment, provocation has become increasingly more important to Kapoor. The violent gesture of firing balls across a room creates a visceral and unsettling scene intended to antagonize the viewer, and to recall conflict both current and gone.
Kapoor himself says, "After years and years of looking for a kind of wholeness in my practice, I find myself over the past couple of years dealing with tragedy and anxiety - with things that are fragmented." Unlike his previous work, which sought to create a state of awe and wonder within the viewer, and to inspire self-reflection from a place of meditation and inwardness, it seems that Kapoor has shifted to consider the self in relation to outward issues. He used red wax, a sticky, heavy, and difficult to mould material to create a body of work including Shooting Into the Corner to force viewers into a state of unease, highlighting the futility of violence by borrowing from the conflict's own language.
In a related piece, Svayambh (2007) (meaning self-made in Sanskrit), he also uses wax; it is a performance piece in which a 40-ton block of the weighty substance, mounted on rails, is slowly pushed through gallery doorways, eventually (and painfully) forcing the corporeal material into the shape of the empty space of the doorframe. Both works reveal Kapoor's interest in creating sculpture that actively participates in its own creation; they introduce an element of trauma, and move away from being colossal. Such works introduce a new phase for Kapoor, and they illustrative that even the most reflective of individuals must constantly reassess, required again to deal with distress and imbalance, having previously found equilibrium.
Mixed media - Royal Academy of Art, London
Descension
First realized for India's Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014 and then constructed as a large outdoor sculpture piece for his solo exhibition at Versailles in 2016, Descension consists of a giant circular whirlpool of water spinning in a vortex, which appears to collapse into a bottomless center. Continuing to expand his notion of voids, Kapoor treated the swirling water with a black dye to give the illusion of a black hole. While also acting as the antithesis to public fountains, the sculpture's imposing physicality highlights water's potential to behave unpredictably. "Water is kind of an interesting material because it's the most common stuff, but in certain circumstances, it can do extraordinary things," notes Kapoor. "It has this kind of power." Manipulating ordinary materials in an extraordinary way, the work is indicative of Kapoor's ability to undermine preconceived assumptions of the physical world.
Shown in several exhibitions around the world, Descension's most recent iteration at Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2017 alludes to the current political uneasiness felt across America. As Kapoor explains, "we're all in this terrible, difficult time. The quotidian questions of our time - in politics especially, but not just in politics - present us with questions we feel we have to answer or find motivation to answer... I toyed with the idea of trying out the title Descension in America to be more particular and to point harder at the current state of things, but I don't think I need to."
Aside though, from standing as comment on a particular moment in history and on a particular set of problems, the work is also imbued with the same universality as Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970). Whilst the spiral of Smithson's jetty presents a more obvious primordial symbol, Kapoor recalls origin through the hole from which we are all born and through our remembrance of marbled ink pictures made as small children. Kapoor's work appears less connected to this earth than Smithson's, and instead looks more metaphysical. Perhaps Kapoor is encouraging his viewer to consider other ways to live and to explore alternative ways of thinking beyond the current.
Funneled water and black dye - Installed in Brooklyn, New York
Biography of Anish Kapoor
Childhood
Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai, India. His mother was the Iraqi-Jewish daughter of a rabbi who immigrated to India from Baghdad with her family when she was an infant. His Hindu father was a hydrographer for the Indian Navy, who spent much of Kapoor's childhood on the ocean collecting data and charting marine navigation. Both of his parents were very modern and cosmopolitan, and sent Anish and his younger brother, IIan, to the prestigious Doon School, an all-boys boarding school in Dehra Dun. There the boys learned equally as much European history as they did knowledge about India. Because of this exclusive education, combined with the diversity and forward thinking within his own family, Kapoor spent his childhood feeling like an outsider unsure of his identity within Indian society. In his late teens, his sense of not belonging developed into deep internal turmoil. "I was seriously fucked up, full of inner conflict that I didn't know how to resolve." As result, Kapoor spent the next 15 years in psychoanalytical therapy, acquiring the tools needed to cope with his imbalance.
Education / Early Training
As a child, Kapoor enjoyed finishing his mother's paintings, but he had no intention of becoming an artist. At age 17, he and his brother used free plane tickets to go to Israel and live and work at a kibbutz in Gan Shmuel. Kapoor fully embraced the kibbutz's communal living and utopian ideas of making a difference in the world. The experience was one of great liberation for Kapoor, and he intended to stay in Israel to study to become an engineer. However, after the realization that he wasn't particularly good at mathematics, Kapoor began to think seriously about becoming an artist. Determined to make a new career path for himself, he hitchhiked across Europe, finally settling in London to attend Hornsey College of Art in 1973. Once settled in the UK he realized that he was doing something he really loved. His mentor, British-Romanian sculptor, Paul Neagu encouraged Kapoor to pursue Performance art, and his guidance influenced Kapoor's approach to sculpture.
After attending Chelsea School of Art for postgraduate studies, Kapoor quit after one year. Unsure where his art career would lead, he traveled back to India. "I suddenly realized all these things I had been making at art school and in my studio had a relationship to what I saw in India", he recalled. "It was a certain attitude to the object. I was making objects that were about doing, about ritual." His trip to India inspired a three-year period of creativity and lead to the creation of his first major works - his ritualistic pigment sculptures. Because of the material, people initially thought Kapoor was a female artist. In spite of this confusion, he quickly gained recognition within the international art community.
Nicholas Logsdail, the owner of Lisson Gallery in London soon took notice of Kapoor's work. During the early 1980s, Logsdail was gathering together a diverse selection of British sculptors, to later become known as the New British Sculptors, and he wanted Kapoor to be part of the group. With his reputation as a serious artist now secure, Kapoor represented Britain in the 1990 Venice Biennale, and won the prestigious Turner Prize in 1991. Kapoor found affinity in his use of traditional earthy materials and tendencies towards spiritual expression, with Logsdail's vision of the New British Sculptors. The loosely formed group included Julian Opie, Antony Gormley, Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg, and Rachel Whiteread, and provided a network of equals with whom Kapoor could exhibit and share ideas.
Mature Period and Current Work
At the same time Kapoor found artistic success, he also found personal fulfillment. In 1995, he married the German-born art historian, Susanne Spicale, while also finally resolving his psychological issues. Crediting psychoanalysis with allowing him to explore his inner mind and process, Kapoor attributes the therapy to a better understanding of his art. From the mid-90s onwards he expanded his use of materials to include polished stainless steel, and then later red wax, and water. More recently, in last two decades, the artist's works are often colossal and site-specific.
Due to Kapoor's large-scale sculptures and numerous public commissions he has become extremely wealthy. He is well known and outspoken on the international art scene. For example, when conceptual artist and activist, Ai Weiwei was imprisoned by the Chinese government for creating subversive work, Kapoor took to social media to protest the unjust treatment of his friend. Embracing the limelight the protest brought with it, Kapoor even starred and danced in a "Gangnam for Freedom" music video along with other notable art world professionals.
In 2014, Kapoor obtained the exclusive rights to Vantablack, making him the only person in the world who could paint using this extremely deep shade of black. The concept of exclusivity surrounding a color seemed ridiculous and caused outrage amongst artists. As English painter, Christian Furr, explained of the controversy, "I've never heard of an artist monopolizing a material. Using pure black in an artwork grounds it. All the best artists have had a thing for pure black - Turner, Manet, Goya. This black is like dynamite in the art world." In retaliation, contemporary British artist, Stuart Semple created the "world's pinkest pink" and banned Kapoor from using it. And while he allows others to use the pigment, they must first agree to a legal declaration stating they are not Kapoor. Further escalating the feud, Kapoor posted a picture on social media of his middle finger dipped in the pink pigment and included the caption: "Up yours #pink". Of course, despite these public escapades, Kapoor continues to produce work at a prolific rate, working from his studio in his home city of London.
The Legacy of Anish Kapoor
Following in the Post-minimalist tradition, according to famed art critic, Roberta Smith, "Kapoor has paid homage to Minimalism's faith in weightless volumes, abstraction, specific materials, saturated color and simplicity of form, while also exploring different materials' capacities for visual illusion, the biggest of Minimalism's no-nos". Many of Kapoor's sculptures, however, appear intensely weighty both in material and in meaning and thus share little of the Post-Minimalist one sighted exploration of material. Furthermore, unlike the Young British Artists who took the art world by storm during the 1990s with their immediately shocking art, Kapoor preferred a gentler approach - enticing his audience with less scandalous but still arresting forms.
Kapoor combines Eastern heritage with Western influence and as a result makes truly international art. His influence has been felt widely and particularly in the work of fellow British sculptor, Conrad Shawcross. Like Kapoor, Shawcross uses sculpture to illustrate metaphor and to make physical poetry. Thus the lyrical, abstract language of modernism that flows from Kapoor continues to be a very current language of art making. Kapoor's iconic public monuments can be found all over the globe illustrative that his is an art that speaks to us of being human, in the simplest and most everyday sense, wherever and whoever you are.
