ART-PRESENTATION: Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor achieved international recognition in the 1980s as a member of the generation of new British sculptors. Since then, he has developed an oeuvre which stands out for its immense diversity and ambition, and has embraced both the intimacy of un-certain objects in interior space to the monumental scale of the urban and rural landscape.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art Archive

The first solo exhibition in Portugal dedicated to the work of Anish Kapoor is on presentation at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto. The exhibition is presented across the 18 hectare Serralves Park together with a presentation in the Serralves Museum of architectural models conceived over the course of the past forty years. Serralves Park, offers a diversity of harmoniously interconnected spaces composing formal gardens, woodlands and a traditional farm. Designed in the 1930s, by Jacques Gréber, the gardens are a unique reference in Portugal’s landscape heritage. In this exhibition conceived across multiple sites in the Serralves Park, the artist exhibits sculptures, some newly conceived, that present the iconic languages of form and material he has become renowned for working in. From works such as “Sky Mirror”, to the dramatic sculpting of the landscape itself; Kapoor’s works take on the mythic qualities and symbolic relationships of landscape. Bringing earth and sky, horizon and dark interior together, his sculptures traverse boundaries and shift meaning. Their form or formlessness situating a state of becoming that is mobile and liminal. We cannot know Kapoor’s sculptures, instead we must experience them. Kapoor is focused on the active or transformative properties of the materials he uses. “I am really interested in the ‘non-object’ or the ‘non-material.’ I have made objects in which things are not what they at first seem to be. A stone may lose its weight or a mirrored object may so camouflage itself in its surroundings as to appear like a hole in space” says Kapoor. “Sky Mirror” is a breathtaking, 10-meter in diameter concave mirror made of polished stainless steel, the work offers a dazzling experience of light and architecture, presenting viewers with a vivid inversion of the skyline. In dialogue with the works in the Park there is an exhibition in the Museum of the artist’s models. Made for works and ideas on an architectural scale, model making as a tool for thinking about form and scale has always been a central process in Kapoor’s studio practice. They present emerging ideas about space that he has come back to again and again, and reveal the importance of experimentation and process as a means to transformation.

Info: Curator: Suzanne Cotter, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Rua Dom João de Castro 210, Porto, Duration: 21/6/18-6/1/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-19:00 Sat-Sun 10:00-20:00 (1 April – 30 September) & Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-19”00 (1 October – 31 March), www.serralves.pt