Born in Mumbai, India in 1954, Anish Kapoor moved to England at the age of nineteen to attend the Hornsey College of Art and later the Chelsea School of Art and Design. While growing up, Kapoor was exposed to the ideas and cultures of both the East and the West; as a result, his work showcases universal concepts and sentiments rather than pursuing a particular artistic trajectory or form. Kapoor began producing his profound and uniquely fundamental works in the late 1970s. In Kapoor’s art, such differing and indeed conflicting elements as presence and absence, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, co-exist and communicate with each other in apparently paradoxical models wherein filling comes through emptying, and spiritual enhancement is achieved through the body.
In the early 1980s, when Kapoor was in his late twenties, his art first began to attract the attention of the public. In 1990, he received the Premio 2000 award at the Venice Biennale. In 1991, winning the prestigious Turner Prize consolidated Kapoor’s position as an established artist. Over the last ten years, Kapoor has gone from strength to strength, with such major projects as Marsyas (2002) for the Tate Modern’s Unilever series; a large permanent installation entitled Cloud Gate (2004) in Chicago’s Millennium Park; Sky Mirror (2006) in New York’s Rockefeller Centre; and Leviathan (2011), the monumental installation project in Paris’ Grand Palais as well as Orbit (2012), which was built to commemorate the 2012 London Olympics. He has consistently proven himself to be an artist loved by the volatile world of contemporary art.
This exhibition is Kapoor’s first major museum show in East Asia, and includes his most important works dating from the early years of his career to the present. The Ground Gallery houses Kapoor’s acclaimed early pigment works, as well as his Void works, large-scale monochromatic works and stainless-steel sculptures that cross the boundary between the material and the immaterial. Installed in the Black Box are works that embody the principle of the “auto-generated,” which transform the gallery into a vast space of creation and formation. The exhibition is the first to occupy the museum’s entire exhibition space including the outdoor sculpture garden, where his most recent major work Tall Tree and the Eye and iconic stainless steel sculptures are installed.
*image (left)
Cave, 2012, Cor Ten steel, 551 x 800 x 805 cm,
Copyrightâ“’Anish Kapoor, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
