Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Anish Kapoor
Indian (lives in Britain, b. 1954)
PLACE (1985)
wood, gesso, and powdered pigment
32" x 32" x 32"
STYLE: Sculpture Courtesy of Barbara Gladstone

Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay, India, moving to Britain when he was 19 to attend art school. He has been exhibiting his sculptures and drawings since the 1970s. Kapoor's sculpture represented Great Britain in the 1990 Venice Biennale where he was awarded the young artist prize. Place (1985) addresses the artist's ongoing concern with locating the essence of spirituality.

Place is made out of simple and inexpensive materials: in this case, wood, gesso, and powdered pigment. Kapoor was heavily influenced by the Arte Povera movement in Italy in the 1960s, which endorsed the use of cast-off or devalued materials. The pigment that heavily saturates these forms is sold in India for cosmetic and religious uses. The smooth, intense surface that results cannot be touched because it damages the work and rubs off on the person touching it. The poetry and symbolism in Kapoor's work has inspired its comparison to many biological and natural phenomena.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS
John Russell, New York Times 5/18/86
"He is a sculptor who would seem, from all appearances, to
work with the least sculptural of all materials—powder.
In his hands, powder, though doubtless with some help from
science, can stand up as bravely as marble and be shaped
and molded in an infinity of ways."
Sarah Kent, Art In America, 9/88
"The objects that brought Anish Kapoor to international
attention in the early 1980s were geometric forms covered
in a think sprinkling of loose pigment which gave them an
aura of color so vibrant that they seemed to expand into
the space of the room."
Kenneth Baker, Art in America, 10/84
"...Kapoors objects are carved polystyrene coated with a mixture of earthen pigment and cement. Made of something light, caked with something heavy, and powdered with intense blue (or black), they are optically dazzling, but strangely obscure as to mass, density, and fragility...The fantastic character of Kapoor's works is cleverly realized...each element of it takes on the ambiguously solidity of a gourd. ..He seems to rely too much upon his methods for making an art object withdraw aesthetically from the huggermugger realm of touchable things."

Donald Kuspit, ARTFORUM, 11/86
"He creates autonomous objects, sometimes in groupings, that resonate with uncanniness, even though we can easily read them spatially...Kapoor's sculptures are generally low-lying: even when, as in Dark, 1986, one of the four elements in geometrical, a kind of architectural sign—a clue to the sacredness of the space—this ground-orientation enhances ones sense of them as growing...The surreal poetic object has customarily been a composite of fragments, a kind of collage of residual signs...Kapoor extends the genre by creating seamless objects whose symbolic meaning is more latent than manifest...Simultaneously geometric and organic, restful and dynamic, stable and unstable, Kapoor's sculptures are, finally, sacramental, sacred ornaments waiting to be placed in the temple of a new religion. They belong in the ritual of a religion that, like the objects themselves, can suavely reconcile death and sex, renewing them as natural mysteries...Emblematically, Kapoor has made the staff of Minimalism blossom like a flower, as in the biblical miracle, transcending the sense of petrified technology that early Minimalist sculptures gave. He has regained the paradise of 'surreal' allusion that was lost with Minimalism, creating objects that are meaningful to the unconscious as well as perceptually subtle."