Anish Kapoor
From 17th December 2016 to 17th April 2017 at MACRO - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma.
Curated by Mario Codognato.
The exhibition is a testimony to Kapoor’s unflagging research in the formal and conceptual spheres, which has informed his artistic practice from the start, contrasting the highly engineered and more organic processes of his work.
The show will comprise a series of reliefs and paintings made up of jutting layers of red and white silicone and paint, as well as monumental architectural sculptures, including the extraordinary “Sectional Body Preparing for Monadic Singularity”, displayed last year outdoors in the park of the Palace of Versailles, and proposed here at the MACRO in a dialogue with the museum’s architecture.
Archetypal, intimate, imposing and dialectic, Kapoor’s work presents, confronts and explores the conditions of matter, the dynamics of perception and the power of metaphor.
Among the other works on exhibit are "Internal Objects in Three Parts" (2013-15), a painted silicone and wax triptych, which was shown this year in Amsterdam, amid celebrated paintings by Rembrandt at the Rijksmuseum. Visceral, brutal and sensual at the same time, Kapoor’s images are a contemporary continuation of the inexhaustible tradition of literal and metaphorical depiction of flesh and blood, found in painting from every era and latitude. Art becomes the mediator between the essence of myth and its representation, between its long-term continuity and interchangeability and the contemporary condition, between one’s individual path through the terra incognita of life and collective experience, between the immanent and the transcendent.
Anish Kapoor’s artistic career has developed around these polarities, engendering and expanding a language in continuous balance between the transposition of grand existential questions and the Promethean impulse to transform the matter around us and, consequently, reality. His poetics implodes, intensifies and probes the binary relationships, opposing energies and antitheses that make up the visible world and abstract thought through a vision which, while never narrative or didactic, coagulates, contrasts or harmonizes the dynamic tension and the subtle interaction between antithetical forces, bodies and appearances. Light and shadow, negative and positive, male and female, material and immaterial, full and empty, concave and convex, glossy and opaque, smooth and rough, natural and artificial, rigid and soft, solid and liquid, active and inert, and ultimately order and disorder: these are just some of the polarities that concretize the perceptible universe and, activated or generated in the synoptic potential and sensual forms of Kapoor’s art, metaphorize and metabolize the mystery of life.
