Lisson Gallery has opened a major exhibition of new works by Anish Kapoor, marking its 30 years of collaboration with the Turner-prize winning artist.
The first living artist to be the subject of a solo exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (2009), Kapoor was born in Bombay in 1954, and first rose to prominence in the 1980s with his brightly coloured, pigment-coated sculptures. The biomorphic forms of the seminal 1000 Names series soon became an iconic part of his extensive oeuvre, heralding what was to become a three-decade long exploration of colour, form and a fascination with dualities.
Later works saw larger-scale installations negotiating and negating space, sometimes seeming to swallow the ground whole, at other times collapsing in on themselves into a void, or creating a new space hovering between the work and its viewer. Kapoor’s sculptures of the past decade, often made of highly-polished metals including stainless steel, gold, bronze and copper, warp and distort not only the viewer’s vision of them, but the very landscape and environment in which they are sited.
Kapoor’s new Lisson Gallery exhibition presents several groups of entirely new works created over the past year. On the one hand, he takes his interest in the transcendental qualities of colour to new levels of luminosity and independent existence. In parallel, he works directly with materials and forms from the earth – mud, cement and metallic pigments.
