Anish Kapoor: Perspective and Experience

Lisson Gallery in London is currently housing an exhibition of new works by Turner-prize winning artist Anish Kapoor, who has an astonishing career since his rise to distinction in the 1980s.  His artworks have caused a stir worldwide with his seemingly simplistic, organic stylistic characteristics.  His great Bean, is one of the most well-known tourist attractions in the United States, stationed in Millennium Park in Chicago. 

The exhibition we encountered today was no less sensational that I would have expected.  Focusing primarily on two collections, the gallery showed two markedly different approaches to artistic production and representation while maintaining a principle notion of exploring new approaches to experience and form.  The artworks force the viewer into a new kind of seeing, one that counts on optical illusion and perspectival contingency. 

The first collection is a new series of earth works presented in both wall and floor sculpture and painting that evoke natural formations of earth, rock, and coral using material and pigments that are extracted from earthen matter.  The wall art, a blend of painting and fixed earthen material on canvas, displays a contrast between a beautifully organic visual experience that contrasts with the raw materiality of the specific elements used to make the work that become more pronounced as you move closer to the canvas.  In this way, the viewer has to move in and out of the “world of the canvas” to obtain the overall aesthetic experience that it can and should provide to a willing audience.

In stark contrast to the incredibly raw, earthen sculptures and wall canvases of the earth works, Kapoor’s fiberglass hemispherical monochromes provide an extreme oppositional approach to a similar notion of optical experience.  The hemispheres are completely covered with solid bold colors that could not be more different form the earth tones that make up the earth works in the other rooms.  These works, however, are hung classically against the stark white walls of the gallery.  

To view them from the front, they appear to be vivid monochrome panels, two-dimensional discs that are suspended against a wall.  By walking to the side of the work, you see that they are, in fact, three-dimensional hemispheres that have an almost infinite quality when standing within their center.  

This creates new questions of perception and experience that again requires an active participation by the viewer and which brings into question deeper dualities:  matter and spirit, physical and optical, tangible and transcendental, evolutionary and transformative.