The United Kingdom-based artist Anish Kapoor’s new show at the Lisson gallery in London is billed as “a radical return to painting”.
The 61-year-old Mumbai-born artist is best known for his giant sculptures: Marsyas, comprising three steel rings joined together by a single span of PVC membrane, filled the enormous Turbine Hall in Tate Modern in London; Sky Mirror, a concave dish of polished stainless steel that reflected the sky, magically mixing technology with nature; and the polarising ArcelorMittal Orbit at the Olympic Park in London, a tower block-sized sculpture.
Kapoor, who was knighted in 2003, launched his latest show by saying: “I’ve had a long engagement with painting, even if I’m supposed to be a sculptor.”
However, it's debatable whether such talk of a back-to-basics approach is simply rhetoric. His new Untitled Works are a hybrid of painting and sculpture, made from silicone and pigment, that resemble the innards of an animal – imagine the preserved human bodies exhibited by the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens, stretched and compressed on a 20-foot canvas.
The fleshy, sinewy aspect of Kapoor’s canvases is accentuated by the predominant use of blood-coloured paint, a hue that often recurs in his oeuvre.
In 2009 – when he became the first living artist to have a solo show at The Royal Academy – he produced a red-wax sculpture that moved through the exhibition. “Red has a terrifying kind of darkness in it,” says Kapoor, “which I’ve always been fascinated by.”
Recognising the oppressive first impression of this new show, Kapoor adds: “I think there is a problematic thing – are they just gross or is there something beautiful about them at the same time. And what does that say about them?”
There are echoes of Dante's Inferno and Rodin's The Gates of Hell. Yet Kapoor has never been one for giving any great clues as to the meaning of his work.
“I want to write a grand opera and deal with all the great issues and, of course, one could kid themselves into believing they could do that,” he says. “But what one can do is allow spaces in the work that don’t exude the possibilities of death or joy or beauty or any of those things.
“To say I’m making a work about death or about joy is just too banal.
“I have often said that I have nothing to say as an artist. People get confused by that and I like that people get confused by it.”
Yet there is an aspect of the agitator in him – how else can you explain his decision to make his fleshy new pieces using silicone, a material most commonly associated with surgical implants?
Kapoor moved to London in the mid-1970s to attend art school and made the city his long-term home.
He initially gained recognition in the early 1980s using simple materials such as granite, limestone and marble, but really began to stand out when he moved into making giant sculptures with stone and steel. Now his use of silicone highlights a desire to use even more experimental materials.
The future promises to be even more exciting. He is preparing for his largest public exhibition to date, at the Palace of Versailles and its gardens in France from June to October.
He is also planning to work on a project with vantablack, a pigment made of carbon nanotubes, that is said to be the darkest material produced on Earth.
Anish Kapoor's Untitled Works runs until May 9 at Lisson Gallery, London. For more information, visit www.lissongallery.com
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