ART-PRESENTATION: Anish Kapoor at Houghton Hall
Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. Perhaps most famous for public sculptures that are both adventures in form and feats of engineering, Kapoor manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous series of work. Immense PVC skins, stretched or deflated; concave or convex mirrors whose reflections attract and swallow the viewer; recesses carved in stone and pigmented so as to disappear: these voids and protrusions summon up deep-felt metaphysical polarities of presence and absence, concealment and revelation.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Houghton Hall Archive
Seminal works by Anish Kapoor are on show across the grounds and historic interiors of Houghton Hall in Norfolk for the exhibition “Anish Kapoor at Houghton Hall”. Houghton Hall was built by Sir Robert Walpole, Great Britain’s first Prime Minister in around 1722. Designed by prominent Georgian architects Colen Campbell and James Gibbs, it is one of the country’s finest examples of Palladian architecture. Houghton and its estate passed to the Cholmondeley family at the end of the 18th Century and remains a family home. The house and award-winning gardens have been open to the public since 1976. The exhibition was originally due to open in March 2020 but had to be postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A number of measures, including pre-booked tickets, are put in place following government guidelines to allow visitors to experience the works at Houghton Hall. “Anish Kapoor at Houghton Hall” features 24 sculptures as well as a selection of drawings and smaller works representative of Kapoor’s ground-breaking body of work created over the past 40 years. Presented together, this series of works will challenge the classical architecture of the house and the idyllic beauty of the grounds, whilst being in continuous dialogue and engagement with Houghton’s history. The exhibition feature some of Kapoor’s major works in mirror and stone, including “Sky Mirror” (2018) – a 5-metre diameter mirror of stainless steel that reflects and transforms the space around it, turning the world upside down – and a series of carved marble sculptures created in 2001 – 2003 which are displayed across the grounds. A number of works will also be shown inside the house, including a series of dramatic sandstone sculptures which will be presented in the gallery spaces. Anish Kapoor’s eponymous “Sky Mirror” series, consisting of large concave mirrors facing upwards and placed outdoors. A variation of Kapoor’s earlier and ongoing “Voids”, sculptures that induce vertigos in their illusory depth, the artist’s Sky Mirrors similarly warp the viewer’s perception of surrounding space, tricking them into thinking that the sky is tumbling down to terrestrial realms. Kapoor began working on his perspective-shifting sculptures in the mid-1990s, with a broader series of concave works tackling notions of reflection and distortion; yet it is with his outdoor formulations that he truly began incorporating nature into his work. Forming part of the artist’s ongoing investigation of space, Sky Mirror is a reflection of its materialisation en plein air; it meditates on permeable physicality, while at the same time offering an echo to the changing of seasons, the transition from day to night, the slightest of alterations in a light’s phosphorescence. As a result, the work is perpetually in process, losing its material form as it dissolves into its surroundings. In its numerous public iterations that include Rockefeller Center, New York, in 2006, Kensington Gardens, London, in 2010-11, Versailles, France, in 2015, and the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, in 2010, the Sky Mirror works have repeatedly demonstrated a striking dual quality, at once mirroring the skies hanging above their various grounds, and living as monumental, charismatic objects in their own right, akin to seminal art-historical mirrors. Each time made in slightly varying dimensions, the Sky Mirrors are conceived to best suit their environments, as well as coexist peacefully with the human presence that surrounds them. In this perspective, they aptly respond to the necessities of their in situ status, whereby their existence as structures is supported by the space in which they live, and the subtleties that differentiate that space from any other.
Info: Curator: Mario Codognato, Houghton Hall, Bircham Rd, King’s Lynn, Duration: 12/7-1/11/20, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-17:00, Tickets Adults £16, Students £10, free to under 18s, Tickets must be pre-booked, www.houghtonhall.com
