Anish Kapoor is one of a generation of internationally acclaimed British artists who came to prominence in the 1980s. He has since developed a distinctive body of work in stone, marble, pigment, stainless steel, and plaster, producing sculptures that can provoke intensely spiritual and physical feelings. This catalog accompanies Kapoor's first major showing in a public gallery in Britain. New pieces created especially for the Hayward Gallery transform the London gallery space, penetrating the walls and floors and giving the impression that the work is growing out of the architecture. Included in the show are a series of monumental stone sculptures weighing up to eight tons each. Much of Kapoor's recent work explores the concept of the "void." The artist cuts deeply into the stone, sometimes coating the interior surfaces with a rich pigment and transforming the void into a charged, dark space. Kapoor also works with reflective surfaces that appear to engulf the viewer and his surroundings. Homi Bhabha's essay asks what kind of theory of art and culture emerges from Kapoor's work. Bhabha offers an "ethical" interpretation that explores the way the sculptures force one to ponder not just art, but the role of art in the world. He also comments on how playful Kapoor's work is in its use of color, object, and fantasy, and on how the combination of "deadly seriousness" and play are essential in his sculptures. "I am really interested in the end, at the end of the process, at the way a stone is not a stone, the way the stone becomes something else, becomes light, becomes a proposition, becomes a lens."—Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor

Arts & Photography

Kapoor, Anish

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

University of California Press

One of the foremost artists of his generation, Anish Kapoor?s majestic, beguiling sculptures, awesome in their size and simple beauty, at once demand a physical response and suggest a metaphysical realm. With stunning photographs of signature works, including new pieces that have never been published, Anish Kapoor is the first major monograph of this internationally renowned and popular artist.Employing intense colors and refined surfaces, and working with contrasts between form and void, and light and darkness, Kapoor?s work evokes the mystical, and creates optical effects that challenge perceptual certainties. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, this richly illustrated book traces Kapoor?s artistic development over the course of a career spanning more than thirty years. Eminent scholars explore the philosophical issues pertinent to his work and examine its place in the history of modern sculpture and in the

British Council

Anish Kapoor: Memory by Sandhini Poddar (2009-02-09)

Lustiger-Thaler, Henri, et al. (Essays by)

Guggenheim Museum

The Art Monographs, a new series from Sylph Editions, juxtapose works of art with literary writing. Informative, evocative, and associative, these lavishly produced texts are a compelling interaction between word and image. In these pages, photographs detailing Anish Kapoor’s vast aluminium sculpture Mountain are considered alongside a three-part theatrical piece by Naveen Kishore entitled What is the Way Up? Made of 120 individual layers of aluminium, the sloping sides of Kapoor’s Mountain evoke the natural process of formation by erosion, but also serve as testimony to the sophisticated technology underlying its construction. The assembled whole invites the spectator to partake in a contemplative journey as Kishore’s characters react and respond to the supernatural presence of Kapoor’s Mountain, expressing their anguish and surprise at the sculpture’s scale, texture, and elusive curves. An electrifying clash of fluid and frothy prose cast against Kapoor’s metal monumentalism, this is a striking and memorable introduction to an extraordinary new series.

Mountain/What is the Way Up?: A literary exploration of Anish Kapoor's sculpture (The Art Monographs)

Kishore, Naveen

Sylph Editions

Published in association with Piano Nobile, a London art gallery, this title features multidisciplinary explorations of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artworks. Each folio explores a single work, attempting to replicate the experience of seeing it with one's own eyes.

Mountain / What is the Way Up? (Volume 6) (Nobile Folios)

Since the early 1980s, Anish Kapoor's investigations into objecthood, materiality and gravity have explored the concept of the void, or "objects becoming space." His sculptures, installations and public art test the phenomenology of space and have historically been characterized by intensely tactile or reflective materials--like colored pigments, wax, fiberglass, polished stainless steel and PVC--that resist any narrative reading. This volume documents Kapoor's 2008 commission for the Deutsche Guggenheim, which travels to New York in 2009. Conceived as an intervention in the galleries that prevents any one complete viewing or experience of the work, and fabricated of Cor-Ten steel with industrial hinges and flanges exposed, the work tests the boundaries between sculpture and painting. It is considered in this volume through the lenses of philosophy, structural analysis and postcolonial and architectural theory. In addition to ample color reproductions of the work itself, this volume includes preparatory sketches and architectural renderings.

HOMI K. BHABHA

Hayward Gallery

Pier Luigi Tazzi

A massive appraisal of a hitherto little-known aspect of Kapoor’s prodigious output 
This 400-page volume is the first publication to explore in depth the painting of British artist Anish Kapoor (born 1934). It offers a unique insight into a language that has increasingly been a focus over the last 10 years, but which has also been an integral part of his studio practice since his career began in the late 1970s. In works that sit on the cusp between abstraction and figuration, Kapoor reveals a desire to go beyond the surface that has been so famously explored in his international beloved sculptural works. Image, surface, space and time appear in sometimes delicate but often violent symmetry. 
With essays from such as acclaimed thinkers as Julia Kristeva and Homi K. Bhabha, with whom the artist has collaborated in articulating his distinctive visual language, this extensive survey traces the trajectory that has led Kapoor to his boldest body of work to date.

Anish Kapoor: Painting

Bhabha, Homi K.

Individual Artists

Walther König, Köln

Shkapoor, Anish

De Pont Stichting,Netherlands

Gallerie dellʼAccademia di Venezia

Marsilio Arte

History & Criticism

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