ART CITIES:Venice-Anish Kapoor – dreamideamachine ART VIEW

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: Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia Archive

The Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia is staging an ambitious presentation of both retrospective and new works by Anish Kapoor, the British artist famed for probing the limits and materiality of the visible world through works that transcend their objecthood and invite wondrous and sustaining interaction. Anish Kapoor’s exhibition at Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia in Venice is the first dedicated to a British artist, also, a further prestigious venue, the historic Palazzo Manfrin, complements this presentation with another major selection of large-scale and genre-defying works. The exhibition, postponed from 2021 because of the pandemic, will be presented during the Venice International Art Biennale in 2022. The exhibition is a comprehensive retrospective presenting key moments in Kapoor’s career and exploring the development of his unique visual language. For the first time, ground-breaking new works, created using carbon nanotechnology, will be shown. These new works further develop the language of Kapoor’s seminal sculptures, which explore the condition of what he has termed the ‘non-object’ – works that investigate the liminal space occupied by an object, between physical presence and immateriality, something that is present but absent, empty yet full. At the Gallerie dell’Accademia Anish Kapoor presents work from his seminal body of early pigment sculptures “1000 Names” and void works – through to never-seen-before sculptures created with Kapoor Black, a ground-breaking nano-technology material, a substance so dark that it absorbs more than 99.9% of visible light. The skin of the object as veil between the inner and outer world has always been a potent presence in the artist’s practice, and here at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, sculptures made with Kapoor Black push this dynamic into radical new territory, in forms that both appear and disappear before our eyes. In these works Kapoor proposes that if the motif of the fold in Renaissance painting was a sign of being, in their obliteration of the contour and edge we are offered nothing less than the possibility to go beyond being. More unknown forces emerge through a further series of mysterious black works, some embedded in the wall of the gallery, that further explore darkness as a physical and psychic reality. Alongside these works Kapoor’s most recent paintings are strongly debuted, setting up a dynamic dialogue with both the Gallerie’s art historical collection, and his own sculptural language. The motif of the skin and the fold is further explored through the spectacular, site-specific “Pregnant White Within Me” (2022), a giant bulge that distends the architecture of the gallery, suggesting a re-drawing of the boundaries between body, building and being. Kapoor commits various sacrilegious acts of shooting at, or cutting into the Accademia’s hallowed walls, turning the very fabric of the gallery inside out. The second venue of Anish Kapoor’s dual exhibition begins with the monumental new work “Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto” (2022), protruding from the ceiling of the entrance hall and created specifically for the partially renovated spaces of Palazzo Manfrin. This pendulous mass of silicone and paint guides visitors through to an equally challenging set of rooms featuring a triptych of similarly seething, silicone paintings, “Internal Objects in Three Parts” (2013–2015), as well as many influential works from Kapoor’s long and prestigious career, including the iconic pigment work “White Sand Red Millet Many Flowers” (1982). Further into the show, a series of mirror works flip and distort the viewer’s expectations of what is before us. Heaven, hell, earth and sea are all invoked, mixed and inverted in public-scale, mechanised works such as the spinning red waters of “Turning Water Into Mirror, Blood Into Sky” (2003) and “Destierro” (2017), in which a monochrome blue digger transports tonnes of red earth in an epic display of displacement. Color for Kapoor is a condition, immersing the viewer in the weight of its saturation, allowing color to enact its transformational potential. Subtleties of Venetian light are at play in ethereal, geometrical works carved from natural alabaster while the deep, lagoon blue pigment of Kapoor’s early void hemispheres provide moments of meditative respite.

Info: Curator: Taco Dibbits, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Campo della Carità, Dorsoduro 1050, Venice, Italy, Duration: 20/4-9/10/2022, Days & Hours: Mon 8:15-14:00, Tue-Sun 8:16-19:15 & Palazzo Manfrin, Fondamenta Venier, Cannaregio 342, Venice, Italy, Duration: 20/4-9/10/2022, Days & Hours: Mon 10:00-14:00, Tue-Sun 10:00-10;00, www.gallerieaccademia.it