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.
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.
