Major Anish Kapoor Exhibition Announced For October 2012

The Lisson Gallery is mounting a major exhibition of new works by Anish Kapoor in October 2012. It will be displayed in both gallery spaces on Bell Street, London, the exhibition marks 30 years of Lisson Gallery working together with the Turner-prize winning artist and provides an in- depth investigation of Kapoor’s most recent work.

The first living artist to be the subject of a solo exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (2009), Kapoor was born in Bombay in 1954, and first rose to prominence in the 1980s with his brightly coloured, pigment-coated sculptures. The biomorphic forms of the seminal 1000 Names series soon became an iconic part of his extensive oeuvre, heralding what was to become a three-decade long exploration of colour, form and a fascination with dualities.

Later works saw larger-scale installations negotiating and negating space, sometimes seeming to swallow the ground whole, at other times collapsing in on themselves into a void, or creating a new space hovering between the work and its viewer. Kapoor’s sculptures of the past decade, often made of highly-polished metals including stainless steel, gold, bronze and copper, warp and distort not only the viewer’s vision of them, but the very landscape and environment in which they are sited.

The mobility of Kapoor’s visual language has been matched by a profound engagement with physical matter – both natural materials including granite and marble, and man-made substances such as wax and fibreglass. Kapoor proposes a complex dialogue between extremes – the earthbound and the transcendental, the colourful and the austere, entropy and the sublime.

Kapoor’s new Lisson Gallery exhibition presents several groups of entirely new works created over the past year. On the one hand, he takes his interest in the transcendental qualities of colour to new levels of luminosity and independent existence. In parallel, he works directly with materials and forms from the earth – mud, cement and metallic pigments.

Germano Celant aptly described Kapoor’s early work as representing a “dialogue between spirit and matter, above and below, masculine and feminine… the duality [in which] the energy of transformation and evolution lies,” This description still holds true in his recent work, while the new work shows the continuing richness of this artistic field of enquiry for generating ever-new ideas and forms.

Anish Kapoor (b.1954, Bombay) lives and works in London. His work has been exhibited extensively internationally at major institutions and exhibitions. Solo exhibitions include; Monumenta, Grand Palais, Paris (2011); Museo Guggenheim de Arte Moderno y Contemporáneo, Bilbao (2011); Pinchuk Arts Centre, Kiev (2010); Guggenheim, New York (2009); Lisson Gallery, London (2009); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2009); MAK, Vienna (2009); Centro Cultural Banco Do Brazil, Rio de Janeiro (2006). Group exhibitions have included Royal Academy of Arts, London (2011); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2010); KolnSkulptur 5, Cologne (2009); Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia (2009).

Kapoor is currently the subject of major solo exhibitions at Pinchuk Art Centre Kiev, 19 May – 30 September 2012, and at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 1

Museum of Modern Art, Nice, 29 June – 16 December 2012. He has forthcoming major exhibitions at the Leeum Samsung Museum, Seoul; 25 October 2012 – 27 January 2013; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 20 December 2012 – 1 April 2013. Kapoor was commissioned by the Greater London Authority to create a permanent artwork for the London Olympics 2012. The resulting Arcelor Mittal Orbit, created in collaboration with Cecil Balmond, is now on display at the London Olympic Park.

Anish Kapoor has also been awarded several prizes including the Padma Bhushan in India (2012), the Praemium Imperiale prize of Japan (2011), the Turner Prize Award (1991) and the ‘Premio Duemila’ at the Venice Biennale (1990). He was elected Royal Academician in 1999 and has been awarded Honorary Fellowships by the London Institute and Leeds University (1997), University of Wolverhampton (1999) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (2001). He was awarded a CBE in 2003. Kapoor’s works can be found in many international museum collections including New, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate, and the Prada Foundation in Milan

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