Anish Kapoor is back at long last for his first exhibition in an Italian museum in 10 years. From 17 December 2016 to 17 April 2017, an extraordinary show is on view in the spaces of the MACRO - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, promoted by Roma Capitale, Council for Cultural Growth, Capitoline Superintendence for Cultural Assets, with the support of the British Embassy of Rome, and main sponsor BNL Gruppo BNP Paribas.
The show comprises a series of reliefs and paintings made up of jutting layers of red and white silicone and paint, as well as monumental architectural sculptures, including the extraordinary “Sectional Body Preparing for Monadic Singularity”, displayed last year outdoors in the park of the Palace of Versailles, and proposed here at the MACRO in a dialogue with the museum’s architecture.
Archetypal, intimate, imposing and dialectic, Kapoor’s work presents, confronts and explores the conditions of matter, the dynamics of perception and the power of metaphor.
Among the other works on exhibit are "Internal Objects in Three Parts" (2013-15), a painted silicone and wax triptych, which was shown this year in Amsterdam, amid celebrated paintings by Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum. Visceral, brutal and sensual at the same time, Kapoor’s images are a contemporary continuation of the inexhaustible tradition of literal and metaphorical depiction of flesh and blood, found in painting from every era and latitude. Art becomes the mediator between the essence of myth and its representation, between its long-term continuity and interchangeability and the contemporary condition, between one’s individual path through the terra incognita of life and collective experience, between the immanent and the transcendent.
Anish Kapoor’s artistic career has developed around these polarities, engendering and expanding a language in continuous balance between the transposition of grand existential questions and the Promethean impulse to transform the matter around us and, consequently, reality. His poetics implodes, intensifies and probes the binary relationships, opposing energies and antitheses that make up the visible world and abstract thought through a vision which, while never narrative or didactic, coagulates, contrasts or harmonizes the dynamic tension and the subtle interaction between antithetical forces, bodies and appearances. Light and shadow, negative and positive, male and female, material and immaterial, full and empty, concave and convex, glossy and opaque, smooth and rough, natural and artificial, rigid and soft, solid and liquid, active and inert, and ultimately order and disorder: these are just some of the polarities that concretize the perceptible universe and, activated or generated in the synoptic potential and sensual forms of Kapoor’s art, metaphorize and metabolize the mystery of life.
The catalogue of the show is published by Manfredi Edizioni.
Anish Kapoor was born in Mumbai, India in 1954, and now lives and works in London. Considered one of the foremost artists in contemporary art, he has works in the most important private collections and museum throughout the world (Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and Abu Dhabi). He has had recent solo exhibitions at: the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City (2016); Couvent de la Tourette, Eveux, France (2015); Château de Versailles, France (2015); Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow, Russia (2015); Martin–Gropius–Bau, Berlin (2013); Sakıp Sabancı Müzesi, Istanbul (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2012).
In 1990 Kapoor represented Great Britain at the XLIV Venice Biennale where he was awarded the Premio Duemila, and in 1991 he won the Turner Prize. He has also received important international recognition including the Praemium Imperiale in 2011 and the Padma Bhushan in 2012. He was awarded a CBE in 2003 and a Knighthood in 2013 for services to visual arts.
His major public projects include Cloud Gate (2004) in Chicago’s Millenium Park and Orbit (2012) in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London.
