Mirrors and Voids with Anish Kapoor
The works of Anish Kapoor can be found worldwide. From Sky Mirror in Nottingham, a six-metre-wide dish of polished stainless steel angled towards the sky, reflecting the world above to Cloud Gate in Chicago. He is renowned for the special attention he pays to materials – especially those from the earth like marble, granite, alabaster and even pink onyx.
Throughout the years, the bold and ambitious work of Kapoor captured the world’s imagination. In 1974, he was part of a prestigious group exhibition at the Serpentine, and a year after at the Royal Academy of Arts. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, and in 1991 won the Turner Prize. But in Kapoor’s case, listing these accolades can prove a frivolous exercise – Kapoor is known around the world for his game-changing and ethereal works.
His latest solo show, and first in Hong Kong, is at Gagosian Gallery where he brings together two core components of his work: mirrored surfaces and voids, both of which he has been working on both for 20 years, the voids and mirrors dating back to the early 1990s.
The first room of the show is about the mirrored spaces; the second room Kapoor displays voids. These are primarily sculptures, such as the pieces made from minerals in rare hues and highly polished metals that provide his anthropomorphic forms with an ineluctable opulence. The piece Gossamer 2015, was carved by Kapoor himself from pink onyx. It’s 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.
Kapoor says that there are only five blocks of pink onyx that exist in the world, and the one Kapoor utilised was from Afghanistan. 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.
The mirrored spaces create a sense of dislocation, said the curator during the exhibition’s opening. “It’s a kind of disruption of space, and of your own personal occupation of that space when confronted with the objects of that space. When you stand at a distance, your image is inverted, as you get closer, your image flips and you are looking, in a sense, at a mirror,” he described.
Objects of mystery are at the core of what Kapoor is interested in exploring with his work. Materiality is also important, as is colour, the idea of fields and charged area of activity for the viewer to enter into as well.
ANISH KAPOOR at Gagosian Gallery, Hong Kong is on now and closes on Saturday 5 November 2016.
Research by Slavica Habjanovic.
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