Tag: anish kapoor

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor, “Dismemberment: Site 1″, Mild Steel Tube and Tensioned Fabric, 2009, gibbs Farm, Kaipara Harbour, New Zealand

This work is an installation for “The Farm”, a private outdoor art gallery in Kaipara Bay, north of Auckland. Kapoor often creates outdoor sculptures as with the case with his first outdoor fabric sculpture. Anish Kapoor states “it is designed to withstand the high winds that blow inland from the Tasman Sea off the northwest coast of New Zealand’s North Island”.

It is 85 metres long and consists of two elliptical steel rings (one vertical, one horizontal), 27 metres across with 32 cables providing displacement and deflection resistance to the wind loads. It is covered in a custom deep red PVC-coated polyester fabric by Ferrari Textiles that weighs 7,200kg alone. It was created with the idea of enhancing views of the harbour to the west and mountains to the east channelling the forces of water, air and rock. It reminds one of red blood cells and veins with a membrane like quality to it that Kapoor describes as being “rather like flayed skin”.

Anish Kapoor

 

Anish Kapoor, “Cloud Gate”. Stainless Steel, Millennium Park, Chicago

Anish Kapoor’s sculpture “Cloud Gate” was constructed between the 2004 and 2006, consisting of 168 stainless steel plates which were welded together. It is popularly known as “The Bean”, the design was inspired by the look and properties of liquid mercury; the sculptures surface reflects Chicago’s skyline.

The exterior is highly polished with no visible seams. On the underside where visitors are able to walk around is the ‘omphalos’, or nave, that warps and muliplies reflections. The volume is  approximately  42 feet x 66 feet x 33 feet having a pronounced weight of 98 long tons. The volume approximately is 42 feet x 66 feet x 33 feet having a pronounced weight of 98 long tons.

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor, “Memory”, Cor-Ten Steel Installation, 2008, Deutsche Guggenheim Museum, Berlin

Anish Kapoor’s 2008 “Memory” is a site-specific work that was conceived to engage two different exhibition locations at the Guggenheim museums in Berlin and New York. Utilizing Cor-Ten steel for the first time, the sculpture represents a milestone in Kapoor’s career. Memory’s thin steel skin, only eight millimeters thick, suggests a form that is ephemeral and unmonumental. The sculpture appears to defy gravity as it gently glances against the periphery of the gallery walls and ceiling. However, as a 24-ton volume, Memory is also raw, industrial, and foreboding.

Positioned tightly within the gallery, Memory is never fully visible; instead the work fractures and divides the gallery into several distinct viewing areas. The division compels visitors to navigate the museum, searching for vantage points that offer only glimpses of the sculpture. This processional method of viewing Memory is an intrinsic aspect of the work. Visitors are asked to contemplate the ensuing fragmentation by attempting to piece together images retained in their minds, exerting effort in the act of seeing—a process Kapoor describes as creating a “mental sculpture.”

Memory’s rusting exterior creates a powdery surface, which relates this commission to Kapoor’s early pigment pieces from the 1980s. Rather than necessitating an additional coat of paint to smooth the interior curvature, the sculpture’s Cor-Ten tiles, perfectly manufactured to prevent light from seeping through, create the necessary conditions for darkness within. The work’s square aperture—wedged precisely into one of the gallery’s walls—allows a view into this boundless interior void.

The endless darkness seems to contradict what visitors know about the work’s delimited exterior. This contradiction between the known and the perceived is one of Kapoor’s central interests. The window also defines a two-dimensional plane that can be read as a painting rather than an opening. Kapoor’s interest in this pictorial effect is best reflected in his statement “I am a painter working as a sculptor.”