Anish KAPOOR

Untitled 1992
Wood, fiberglass and pigment
2085 x 1190 x 1430 mm
International Art Sculpture Collection, Auckland Art Gallery
Gifted by the Edmiston Trust

Anish Kapoor's work straddles two very different cultures - Indian and English. Through this rich dual history he draws on ancient cultural traditions and the most vigorous tenets of modernism.

"Kapoor's early sculptures from the1970s and early 1980s are strongly biomorphic in shape…Form, however, was mitigated by the intensity of pure powder pigment with which he covered these structures." Later they were enclosed within an interior encased by a protective utilitarian wooden container as found in Untitled, 1992.

"Drawn towards (its) velvety black interior, one at first perceives the space to be completely empty. As one's eyes adjust to the faintly illuminated interior one detects the true colour of the void - a resonating sublime blue symbolic of transcendence and the absolute. Gradually we become aware of an ever so subtle modulation to this vertiginous blue which draws us closer and closer. Gradually the void responds to our attentions, swelling and pressing forward to meet us, then filling the void with its presence."

Reference: Text ex Lisson Gallery, London.

ANISH KAPOOR, an Indian-born British artist, was born in Bombay in 1954. He moved to England in 1972 and studied at the Hornsey College of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art in London where he continues to live and work today.

In the early 1980s, Kapoor emerged as one of a number of British sculptors working in a new style and gaining international recognition for their work. In 1990 he was selected to represent Britain at the XLIV Venice Biennale, and in 1991 he won the Turner Prize for his work.

While rooted in an ancient Hindu cultural tradition, Kapoor's sculptures also fit within the tenets of modernism, and more broadly within a body of modernist art that has aspired to the abstract sublime. His early pieces rely on powder pigment to cover the works and the floor around them. This practice was inspired by the mounds of brightly coloured pigment in the markets and temples of India. His later works are made of solid, quarried stone, many of which have carved apertures and cavities, often alluding to, and playing with, dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightness-darkness, visible-invisible, conscious-unconscious, male-female and body-mind).The distinctive ultramarine blue pigment that Kapoor uses is expressive of the infinite in the same sense as Yves Klein employed it.

Kapoor's sculptures mark an important development, by treating space, or the void, as a sculptural property. The result is a kind of sculpture that has become liberated from mass and physicality. Kapoor's sculpture embodies aspects of Minimalism charged with a sensuality that is absent from the geometric constructions of the 1970s Minimalist sculptors.