The Mumbai-born, London-based artist finally comes to India with a career retrospective.
Finally, we will have an Anish Kapoor show in India and there will be no more need to be embarrassed about our never having seen anything by an artist we claim as one of our own. Kapoor, with his gigantic sculptures and installations, has been the toast of the (largely Western) world for almost three decades, but has never before shown in India. His only works exhibited in the country so far have included two stainless steel discs that caused much excitement at the India Art Summit in New Delhi last year, one of which was bought by Kiran Nadar reputedly for Rs 1.25 crore.
For a Kapoor work, that’s still remarkably inexpensive. His large pieces regularly sell for upwards of Rs 70 crore each, an Untitled steel disc was auctioned by Christie’s for Rs 76 crore, he’s said to have a private fortune in excess of Rs 300 crore, and city councils have commissioned his works for public spaces from Paris and Naples to Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, Toronto, Chicago and New York. There was talk of a Kapoor sculpture to be commissioned in the Indian capital ahead of the Commonwealth Games, but nothing came of it — Kapoor installations, typically, require big budgets, and even then have to be booked several years ahead.
In London, where he’s based, an exhibition of his recent works — some of them include Sky Mirror, Cloud Gate, C-Curve and Non-Object (Spire) — began at Kensington Gardens in September and will run till mid-March next year. In part, this may help overcome some of the unease Londoners have expressed of the 115-metre high and, it must be said, probably the most controversial work from Kapoor’s stable, under preparation for installation ahead of the London Olympics 2012. Titled ArcelorMittal Orbit — the sponsorship is evident, and equals Rs 115 crore — it resembles something like a mangled Eiffel Tower.
The Indian exhibition — or exhibitions, since Kapoor will show simultaneously in New Delhi and Mumbai — will turn out to be his most extensive yet. What it may lack in terms of his humungous, 35-metre high sculptures, it will more than make up in terms of range, and will include his early pigment-based works from the eighties, the more familiar reflective steel, wax installations and works in resin. Though the dates for the twin exhibitions have not been formally released, in all probability the launch party in New Delhi will be on November 27 (with the exhibition running at National Gallery of Modern Art from November 28 till February 27, 2011) and in Mumbai on November 29 (with the show opening for the public at Mehboob Film Studio from November 30 till January 16, 2011).
Anish Kapoor, for those who came in late, was born in Mumbai in 1954, but has lived in London since the early seventies, where he both studied as well as taught art, before his career took off with his gigantic, highly reflective stainless steel orbs and ends, which create amusing illusory distortions for viewers as it reflects them, the skyline as well as the sky all around in an amusing diorama of the space each such work occupies. Unusually then, his site-specific show in Berlin last year, called “Memory”, consisted of oversized pods in a tunnel and induced a terrifying sense of claustrophobia. His 2007 work, Swayambh, in wax, had a similar disorienting but oppressive quality.
While it’s still possible to pick up somewhat small steel discs of the kind Nadar snapped up (approximately 6 ft in diametre), which are in the nature of limited edition works, for a crore or two, his public space sculptures could cause huge gaps in city planners’ budgets and may require the likes of Sunil Mittal to dedicate to New Delhi (a la Lakshmi Mittal in London). But for those who want a slice of Kapoor without going into a blue funk on the spend, galleries routinely sell his aquatints and etchings in the range of Rs 3 lakh. It may be less typical of his work but it’s at least an affordable souvenir of an artist who’s found himself a firm niche in the global history of contemporary art.
These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which the writer is associated.
