The skin, the outermost covering, has always been for me the place of action. It is the moment of contact between the thing and the world.
—Anish Kapoor
Gagosian is pleased to present Anish Kapoor’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Hong Kong.
In sculptures made during the last ten years, 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. Minerals in rare hues and highly polished metals provide his anthropomorphic forms with an ineluctable opulence.
In his monumental sculptural practice, Kapoor conflates concave and convex, inside and outside, upright and inverted. In the works in the exhibition, he explores and achieves the same tensions on a more intimate scale. Nestled in corners or placed on the floor, these sculptures feel almost familiar. Viewers entering the gallery share their space and their gravity. Yet, despite the appeal of their colors and textures, and the intimation of their weight, the sculptures resist approach. Curved mirrors of stainless steel and aluminum, mounted on the wall or free-standing, distort the viewer’s reflection and unsettle, or even liquefy, the slabs of carved stone that rest solidly on the floor. The effect is one of incomprehensibility without apparent reason—as if the rules of physics are being broken, but there is no way to prove it.
In Gossamer (2015), a large piece of pink onyx 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. Whether encountering the dark seams of Kapoor’s forms folding in on themselves, or, as is with Vertigo (2006), one’s own reflection is multiplied within a warped architecture, there is a consistent sense of having entered a space that is at once natural, artificial, and alchemical.
Source: Gagosian exhibition page
The skin, the outermost covering, has always been for me the place of action. It is the moment of contact between the thing and the world.
—Anish Kapoor
Gagosian is pleased to present Anish Kapoor’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in Hong Kong.
In sculptures made during the last ten years, 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. Minerals in rare hues and highly polished metals provide his anthropomorphic forms with an ineluctable opulence.
In his monumental sculptural practice, Kapoor conflates concave and convex, inside and outside, upright and inverted. In the works in the exhibition, he explores and achieves the same tensions on a more intimate scale. Nestled in corners or placed on the floor, these sculptures feel almost familiar. Viewers entering the gallery share their space and their gravity. Yet, despite the appeal of their colors and textures, and the intimation of their weight, the sculptures resist approach. Curved mirrors of stainless steel and aluminum, mounted on the wall or free-standing, distort the viewer’s reflection and unsettle, or even liquefy, the slabs of carved stone that rest solidly on the floor. The effect is one of incomprehensibility without apparent reason—as if the rules of physics are being broken, but there is no way to prove it.
In Gossamer (2015), a large piece of pink onyx 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. Whether encountering the dark seams of Kapoor’s forms folding in on themselves, or, as is with Vertigo (2006), one’s own reflection is multiplied within a warped architecture, there is a consistent sense of having entered a space that is at once natural, artificial, and alchemical.
Source: Gagosian exhibition page
