ART CITIES:México City-Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor states that when the process leads the artist, the work is a discovery. His artistic practice involves a phenomenological approach based on the experience of the creative act, as the artist himself suggests: “I don’t have anything to say, but I know that if I immerse myself into the process, it brings me to meanings I could never have imagined”.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo Archive
The exhibition “Archaeology: Biology” has been conceived in the context of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), bearing in mind the listed architecture of the main campus and the university’s historical, social and political relevance. Kapoor’s works deal with abstract ideas, ideas that relate to the pre-cultural, before a national or cultural identity, to experiences that are perceptual but also psycho-physical. Although the exhibition is not chronological, it offers a wide-ranging perspective on Kapoor’s work, with sculptures dating from 1980 to 2016, experience of material and form are articulated around four thematic sections. The first section titled, “Auto-Generated Forms”, includes work made in the medium that established Kapoor’s reputation towards the end of the ‘70s: pigment. The colored powder was significant because it lacked concrete materiality. Often mysterious objects with uncertain boundaries, other works turn upon the interaction of form with light: perfect prisms and mirrors that extend and distort space. The second section, “Many Kinds of Beauty”, proposes a strangely harmonious post-industrial world, bringing into tension the ideals of purity and the mathematical precision of form, the swelling of “When I am Pregnant” (1992), the seamless mirror surface of “C-Curve” (2007), with the grotesque and the scatological cement extrusions of “Ga Gu Ma” (2011–12). In “Time”, we are enveloped by the monochrome red dome “At the Edge of the World” (1998), a work that frames abduction as a means of representing the infinite. And finally, in “Unpredictable Forces” we confront works of primal origin, cavernous forms in earth and color “ My Red Homeland “ (2003) a churning disc of wax in a perpetual motion and state of becoming, silicone paintings of a visceral and cannibalistic materiality, and a vast biological fissure in the gallery wall, “Archaeology and Biology” (2007).
Info: Curator: Catherine Lampert, Associate curator: Cecilia Delgado, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Centro Cultural Universitario, Insurgentes Sur 3000, México City, Duration 28/5-27/11/16, Days & Hours: Wed, Fri & Sun: 10:00-18:00, Thu & Sat 10:00-20:00, http://muac.unam.mx/
