Somatize Anish Kapoor

Copenhagen,

Born in 1954 in Bombay, Anish Kapoor settled in London in 1973 to study sculpture at the very open Hornsey School of Art, and has lived and worked in the British capital since then. In 1990 he represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale, where an international jury awarded him the 2000 Prize, and since the early eighties his works have been exhibited regularly around the world, testifying to the artist's lack of conformism, focused on reinvention. continuation of his language, both in his most monumental pieces and in those of a more intimate nature.

His creations, composed of natural or artificial materials, often constitute suggestive abstract metaphors and stand out for their aesthetic effects; Some of his larger proposals have now been brought together by the Arken Museum, near Copenhagen, in “UNSEEN”, the most extensive exhibition programmed so far in that center and the most relevant of those that have been offered to Kapoor in the Nordic countries. It has been an exhibition, and there was no other, technically demanding: it was necessary to redesign spaces, even removing floors, to make room for some of the installations, so that the Arken that we visited today is not the same one that could be visited in March or the one who will recover later; The Indian has turned him, in some way, into one of his projects.

Among his extensive production, those works capable, perhaps, of generating greater emotional or physical resonances in the viewer, of arousing experiences, have been selected for the occasion; These are often derived from the accentuation of the contrasts between light and darkness, between what is visible and the evocation of what is not or between mass and lightness; A virtuoso of the transformation of materials, this author plays with reflections, tones, with the apparently weightless and the concave to modify our perception, both of those materials and of the places where they sit. Sometimes, his ultimate objective is none other than to ensure that the public can question some identity feelings, by bringing them closer to more or less transcendent issues that question universally.

Faced with conceptual trends, Kapoor has always opted to accentuate the physical nature of his creations as a means to move and to reclaim the importance of the sensory and being present, in our era of preeminence of digital and remote consumption. Only by contemplating them directly can one fully appreciate the indicated weight of memory in Memory (2008), executed with twenty-four tons of Corten steel, or feeling vertigo in front of Descent into Limbo (1992), both arriving in Copenhagen; Their tools to divert our gaze from screens are, fundamentally, tactile or highly reflective materials, pure and bright pigments, blood-red wax, painted fiberglass, stone, polished stainless steel and, more recently , cement.

Anish Kapoor. Descent into Limbo, 2015. Photography: David Stjernholm

Another relevant chapter, which can also be traced in this exhibition, is his treatment of objects, which has expanded post-minimalist practices and which has had a clear echo in other contemporary sculptors. Studying color, scale, materiality, spaces and processes, he has worked time and again around key developments he calls “languages of form”; Like his first “voids,” his latest installations, monumentalizations of those inspired by architecture and intended for specific locations, involve phenomenological events that give rise to sensations that are both intimate and collective.

For Kapoor, the object (like his art in a broad sense) is always in a state of mutation, because it goes through different processes of self-generation, dissolution, fragmentation and multiplication that he seeks to deploy. He takes into account the presence of the body and the gaze of the future observer when creating them: each of us contributes our subjective reality when we face these powerful sculptural structures.