Anish Kapoor is at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia with his solo exhibition, Anish Kapoor, until October 9, 2022.
The bond between Kapoor and the lagoon city has always been strong, so much so that the artist decided to open his Foundation there at Palazzo Manfrin, in the Cannaregio district.
The exhibition, divided between the spaces of the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia and the same Palazzo Manfrin, is curated by none other than Taco Dibbits, Director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Anish Kapoor: materials, colors, and themes
Anish Kapoor is a multifaceted artist who uses materials such as marble, wood, granite, limestone, or plaster. His works are characterized by geometric objects or bioforms featuring vivid colors – a tribute to Indian culture – and mirrored surfaces that reflect or, conversely, absorb light.
The artist’s favorite colors range from blue, traditionally associated with esotericism and religions, to red, which is synonymous with violence and impulsiveness, approaching in strength to black.
Black for Kapoor, unlike in Renaissance art where it was a means to exalt light, leads to darkness.
Not surprisingly, within the exhibition, set up as a large retrospective of the Indian artist’s career, all his most representative works are displayed, including those made with the so-called Kapoor Black, a material created through nanotechnology capable of absorbing about 99.9% of light.
Another of the predominant themes in Kapoor’s artistic research is certainly that of skin, which can be represented either by mirrored surfaces or by different materials, inserted into a tension structure and then torn.
Among the works exhibited, Shooting Into the Corner and Pregnant White Within Me.
The former consists of a cannon, created by Kapoor in collaboration with engineers, that fires real projectiles made of red wax weighing 11 kilograms each.
The result? An apocalyptic scene.
Shooting Into the Corner, aimed directly at the entrance, is immediately visible to the visitor.
The work, considering the current historical period and the war in Ukraine, can easily be interpreted as a reference to it, even though there is no explicit connection.
This is a work that plays on tension, on the strong aggressiveness of the projectiles, and on the silence that precedes the shot and the impact.
Pregnant White Within Me is instead a more recent creation.
It is a work that, for its visual power, deserves to be admired in person: it consists of a white bulge in the wall that expands its shapes and space.
Anish Kapoor at the Gallerie dell’Accademia is the perfect combination of geometric forms, colors, surfaces, and innovative and refined materials within an ancient, fascinating, and orderly setting.
