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The master of steel

The master of steel

Turner Prize winner, Anish Kapoor creates impactful masterpieces in the form of minimalist sculptures that feature simple materials, geometric shape and organic forms.

After first establishing his reputation in the 1980s with biomorphic sculptures in limestone and other natural materials, Kapoor began to explore the theme of “the void” in large-scale stone works, some with defined insides and outsides and others that clearly delineate empty spaces. In 2006, he installed Sky Mirror at Rockefeller Center, a 23-ton, three-story stainless steel sculpture that reflected the New York skyline. He described the massive work as a “non-object” because its reflective surface allowed it to disappear.

Drawing the human image in

An understanding of the shiny steel as well as the physicality of the concave sculptural circular, oval or elliptical creations becomes an expressionist and experiential vertiginous depth which draws viewers who walks toward his works to understand the sensorial impact of nothingness. Kapoor has said that he “wishes to make sculpture about experience that is outside material concern,” and he always manages to succeed in stirring multiple human responses to his work as he cuts through class, barriers and time.

Modernist

Split as a sculpture is striking, it carries within a Zen auratic mood within its stainless steel sculptural ferment, and it must be seen apart from the “transcendentalisation” of the viewer. What entices and enchants  is the vivid materiality, the modernist celebration of geometry, even as it subtly transcends changing appearances as humans who walk in front of the steel coalesce into slim gradients of animated legions. Kapoor revels in his craftsmanship, and you know that he has a deep understanding of physicality to give the sculpture’s concave centre the lustre required to turn it into a mirror. Kapoor invites the silent spectator to morph into a mirrored spectator who remains strongly three-dimensional, belonging at once to a hologram-like ecstatic effect.

The effect is a new remoteness that is born of the shiny luminosity and the humans that become part of the reflection become the insignia of the sculpture and therein lies the delight. It was at the Hong Kong Art Fair 2010 that I experienced the purity as well as the juvenile delight Kapoor could give his spectators with his lush highly polished steel sculptures.

Steel and colour

He also engages and revels in his sculpture — the steel and the colour give us an amalgam of the  raw and refined, and like one critic in London said “he has fine-tuned the tension between the opposites, creating an opportunity for reparative unity that the ready-made unity of his globes — the foreordained unity of the circle.”

Split’s success is its highly polished mirrored surface that replicates the human figure in all its intricate lesser or greater than magnitude.

Indeed we all know that mirrors are seductive and Kapoor revels in giving his viewer’s a narcissist’s treat. But the sculpture is also about light and space, time and tide that waits for none.

Kapoor’s exploration of infinite space, over the years creates islands of reflections within and without. He continues to explore the notion of endless space, the void, as he pointed to, in his Boston show years ago “The idea of place has always been very important to my work. A place has to be original. The word original means that it has to do with ‘first’ and I think that is to do with centering oneself, allowing a thing to occur specifically rather than in general. A lot of my works are about passage, about a passing through, and that necessitates a place. The place of action. It is the moment of contact between the thing and the world. The spatial questions it seems to ask were not about deep space but about present space… and they seem to be very active, to be in various states of becoming,” says Kapoor. Art Dubai will celebrate the deeper understanding of a universal language in simple elements of time and its creator.

Writer: U Nair

Courtesy: The Pioneer

The master of steel

The master of steel

Turner Prize winner, Anish Kapoor creates impactful masterpieces in the form of minimalist sculptures that feature simple materials, geometric shape and organic forms.

After first establishing his reputation in the 1980s with biomorphic sculptures in limestone and other natural materials, Kapoor began to explore the theme of “the void” in large-scale stone works, some with defined insides and outsides and others that clearly delineate empty spaces. In 2006, he installed Sky Mirror at Rockefeller Center, a 23-ton, three-story stainless steel sculpture that reflected the New York skyline. He described the massive work as a “non-object” because its reflective surface allowed it to disappear.

Drawing the human image in

An understanding of the shiny steel as well as the physicality of the concave sculptural circular, oval or elliptical creations becomes an expressionist and experiential vertiginous depth which draws viewers who walks toward his works to understand the sensorial impact of nothingness. Kapoor has said that he “wishes to make sculpture about experience that is outside material concern,” and he always manages to succeed in stirring multiple human responses to his work as he cuts through class, barriers and time.

Modernist

Split as a sculpture is striking, it carries within a Zen auratic mood within its stainless steel sculptural ferment, and it must be seen apart from the “transcendentalisation” of the viewer. What entices and enchants  is the vivid materiality, the modernist celebration of geometry, even as it subtly transcends changing appearances as humans who walk in front of the steel coalesce into slim gradients of animated legions. Kapoor revels in his craftsmanship, and you know that he has a deep understanding of physicality to give the sculpture’s concave centre the lustre required to turn it into a mirror. Kapoor invites the silent spectator to morph into a mirrored spectator who remains strongly three-dimensional, belonging at once to a hologram-like ecstatic effect.

The effect is a new remoteness that is born of the shiny luminosity and the humans that become part of the reflection become the insignia of the sculpture and therein lies the delight. It was at the Hong Kong Art Fair 2010 that I experienced the purity as well as the juvenile delight Kapoor could give his spectators with his lush highly polished steel sculptures.

Steel and colour

He also engages and revels in his sculpture — the steel and the colour give us an amalgam of the  raw and refined, and like one critic in London said “he has fine-tuned the tension between the opposites, creating an opportunity for reparative unity that the ready-made unity of his globes — the foreordained unity of the circle.”

Split’s success is its highly polished mirrored surface that replicates the human figure in all its intricate lesser or greater than magnitude.

Indeed we all know that mirrors are seductive and Kapoor revels in giving his viewer’s a narcissist’s treat. But the sculpture is also about light and space, time and tide that waits for none.

Kapoor’s exploration of infinite space, over the years creates islands of reflections within and without. He continues to explore the notion of endless space, the void, as he pointed to, in his Boston show years ago “The idea of place has always been very important to my work. A place has to be original. The word original means that it has to do with ‘first’ and I think that is to do with centering oneself, allowing a thing to occur specifically rather than in general. A lot of my works are about passage, about a passing through, and that necessitates a place. The place of action. It is the moment of contact between the thing and the world. The spatial questions it seems to ask were not about deep space but about present space… and they seem to be very active, to be in various states of becoming,” says Kapoor. Art Dubai will celebrate the deeper understanding of a universal language in simple elements of time and its creator.

Writer: U Nair

Courtesy: The Pioneer

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