Anish Kapoor

Art Life , Exhibitions Dec 28, 2012 No Comments

From Andrew Frost

One doesn’t often get a summer art blockbuster as big as the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Anish Kapoor extravaganza. As part of the Sydney International Art Series, the exhibition brings to Sydney a number of the artist’s signature works including the 25 ton steel work Memory [2008], a huge object that has been designed to create the illusion that it’s simply too big to fit into the gallery. Kapoor’s monumental sculptures use a limited array of geometric shapes but, working with scale, material and colour, the Indian-born British artist’s work evokes infinities within black ovals, limitless voids inside cold blocks of stone or ambiguous armoured shells of metal.

2008 Memory a

It’s this reference to the sublime that gives Kapoor’s work its biggest ‘wow’ factor, a minimalist sculptural aesthetic overlaid with a sense of the theatrical. In early works such as Void [1989] the sculpture creates an optical illusion that captivates in its simplicity, whereas works such as S-Curve [2006] or the series of gargantuan monuments created for the London Olympics, the Grand Palais in Paris or the Millennium Park in Chicago, are Hollywood-scale objects only possible through vastly complex fabrication and expensive installation. Fans of either tendency will find examples of both approaches in Kapoor’s MCA outing, a homage to the absurdity of scale and the subtlety of restraint.

Until April 1,
Museum of Contemporary Art, The Rocks.
Pic: Anish Kapoor, Memory, 2008.

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Andrew Frost

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