India-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor’s first solo show in India opens today. Much anticipated, this will showcase a representative range of his oeuvre.
The Anish Kapoor shows that open in Delhi today and Mumbai tomorrow comprise works that were part of the large retrospective at the Royal Academy, London, that ended in February this year. Taken together, these are Kapoor’s first solos in India; he’s been the showstopper at group shows earlier: ‘Link’ at Mumbai’s Sakshi Gallery in 2008 and the Lisson Gallery stall at last year’s India Art Summit, where two of his works were reportedly sold for about £400,000 each — his highest prices.
While Mumbai’s Mehboob Studios will show the larger, more monumental works, the Exhibition Hall at Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art — a more conventional ‘gallery’ space — will get the more moderately sized pieces. There will be Kapoor’s works from the 1980s, where he uses powder pigments in brilliant hues of red, yellow and blue; there’ll be later works such as ‘Past, Present, Future’, and ‘Swayambh’, that’s been a hit wherever its shown. A few major works in stainless steel and fibreglass that have not been seen before are also likely to be part of the show.
This Kapoor show is much anticipated — the artist has often spoken about exhibiting in the country of his birth, and even confessed that he had come scouting for locations around 10 years ago, but nothing came of it. After all, given the scale of most of his works — a small Kapoor is large by the standards of most Indian artists — transporting them called for a feat of logistics and a sponsor with deep pockets. Kapoor found one in Louis Vuitton, with the government agencies of both India and Britain — the British Council and the NGMA — coming together to ease the process.
Kapoor was born in Mumbai on March 12, 1954. His mother was a Baghdadi Jew and his father a Punjabi Hindu. He studied at Doon School before leaving in 1971, then just 17, for Israel to study a technical engineering course. Soon after, he arrived in Britain, attending first the Hornsey College of Art (1973-77) and later the Chelsea School of Art Design (1977-78).
His rise was meteoric and, by the 1980s, he and others such as Tony Cragg, Julian Opie and Richard Deacon were being hailed as the ‘New British Sculptors’ who were breaking new ground with their abstract sculptures using industrial materials.
In 1982, just four years after he graduated from art school, he represented Britain at the Paris Biennale. He did so again in 1990, when he won the Premio Duemila prize. A year later, he won the Turner prize; in 2003, he was given a CBE.
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Over the past decade, especially, Kapoor has emerged as quite a ‘star’ on the British art scene. His show last year at the Royal Academy of Art (he’s been a member since 1998) was the first by a living British artist. But it’s his mammoth, commissioned works that have caught the attention of the world. The first of these probably was ‘Taratantara’ for the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, then in 1999 an out-of-use grain warehouse. Presaging Kapoor’s later works that approximate architecture in the way they order space, Taratantara was very large — 50 metres long — and made of stretched red PVC. It was also the first Kapoor installation that was conceived in order to regenerate a disused urban space.
The Tees Valley Giants, in the same vein, are perhaps the most ambitious. Part of a £2 billion programme to develop infrastructure and revive the economy of this part of northeast Britain, Kapoor and Cecil Balmond are collaborating on a series of five large-scale installations — ‘giants’ — which will cost around £15 million. The first of these, ‘Temenos’, was unveiled this summer and has attracted thousands of visitors already.
Equally large, expensive and hyped has been the ArcelorMittal Orbit — London’s art showpiece, which will be finished in time for the games. Kapoor is also working on the British memorial for 9/11 at Ground Zero in New York, a commission he won in 2003. As he revealed recently, this will be a 6 metre-high block of black granite with an inner chamber that will be polished to a mirror shine.
Over the years, Kapoor’s works have evolved from the early pigment-sculptures in which the Indian influences were obvious — the dome, the Jantar Mantar, etc. — to the rough blocks of stone with orifices carved into them, and then the polished stainless steel surfaces that “turns the world inside out” and, of late, cement. His practice, too, has widened to kinetic sculptures, the popular ‘Swayambh’, and even a performance-based installation called ‘Imagined Monochrome’ for the Brighton Festival last year.