Anish Kapoor

by Jean de Loisy (Introduction), Homi Bhabha (Contributor)

This new retrospective monograph, produced in direct collaboration with internationally renowned contemporary artist Anish Kapoor, is the most comprehensive to date.
Anish Kapoor, one of the most highly acclaimed sculptors working today, is winner of the 1991 Turner Prize and creator of Monumenta 2011. Kapoor enjoys immense popularity and has represented Britain at both the Paris Biennale and the Venice Biennale. His first solo exhibition in Paris in 1980 was been followed by numerous solo exhibitions in major venues around the world, including Sky Mirror installed at Rockefeller Center in New York in 2006. He is the fourth artist to be invited to the Grand Palais in Paris to create a unique and original work for the immense interior space. At once metaphysical, profoundly poetic, and visually explosive, Kapoor's work demands a visceral as well as meditative response.
Full color reproductions spanning more than three decades of artistic output are accompanied by an incisive interview with the artist, while Kapoor's work is situated and explored in a critical essay by a leading Harvard scholar.

384 pages, Hardcover

First published September 13, 2011

Reviews

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bhabha (and Kapoor) want to cipher the latter's work as a sort of deconstructing of the surface/void opposition: surfaces that conjure voids (or voids that conjure surfaces). The void as not an emptiness: the void, rather, as a density. Bhabha explicitly refers to the "vaginal" nature of some of the works featured here, and one could read their reading as proto-feminist (in its rejection of concavity as absence). But I find something far more ambiguous: instead of the work of some women artists, which seek to appropriate the auto-violence of the female body as a capacity instead of a detriment, it seems that Kapoor's fixation on the female body quickly becomes one of the (external) violence against it (see particularly: The Dismemberment of Jeanne d'Arc). Phallus as monolith: it all becomes a bit trope-y after awhile. What perhaps undercuts this dichotomy somewhat: that work perhaps most familiar to Americans, Chicago's Cloud Gate, colloquially referred to as "The Bean": clitoris as figure of the phallic feminine.