ART-PRESENTATION: Anish Kapoor-My Red Homeland

Coinciding with the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, “My Red Homeland”, the first solo exhibition of Anish Kapoor in Russia, opened at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre in Moscow. Four sculptures encompassing the three major facets of Kapoor’s unique and distinct visual language: voids, mirrors, and the auto-generated, are on presentation.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre Archive

The exhibition’s title “My Red Homeland” is taken from the sublime centerpiece of the show. It consists of a circular platform, 12 metres across, supporting 20 tons of wax and Vaseline mixed with pigment. An enormous square steel block, propelled by a motorized arm, slowly traces a one-hour course around the circle, destroying the wax and reshaping it into dams and peaks around the edge of the piece. Created in 2003, it was the first piece that Kapoor made in this new material. “I tried making things on a relatively small scale out of this ‘stuff’ and found that just the fact of making the things somehow got in the way of the power of the material” he says. “S-Curve”, is an irresistibly photographable curved, mirrored wall, which Kapoor calls “a selfie object in the age of the selfie”. Much like a fun house mirror, the work alters the human form by its reflection stretching it into thin, abstract shapes. The other works of the exhibition is the concave painted fiberglass wall sculpture “Shelter” and “My Body Your Body”. As one approaches “My Body Your Body”, the centre appears to move and change depending on where you look, and the piece appears to recede into the wall causing a ‘black hole’ effect. Even the material of the work is confusing, it has the appearance of fabric but in fact is fibreglass. Moreover, posing in the form of traditional rectangular wall-hung paintings, these works playfully confront established ideas of art. Rendered in pigment, steel and wax, the works epitomise Kapoor’s manipulation of matter to create a landscape and geology that is both other and sublime. “I am interested in sculpture that manipulates the viewer into a specific relation with both space and time. Time, on two levels; one narratively and cinematically as a matter of the passage through the work, and the other as a literal elongation of the moment. This has to do with form and colour and the propensity of colour to induce reverie. Consequently, I hope, an elongation of time. Space is as complex, the space contained in an object must be bigger than the object which contains it. My aim is to separate the object from its object-hood” Anish Kapoor explained.

Info: My Red Homeland, The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Obraztsova St., 11, Build. 1A, Moscow, Duration: 22/9/15-17/1/16, Days & Hours: Sun-Thu: 12:00-22:00, Fri: 10:00-15:00, www.jewish-museum.ru