Spotlight Review - Massachusetts

Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future
Institute of Contemporary Art • Boston, MA • www.icaboston.org

Anish Kapoor, Past, Present, Future, wax and oil-based paint, 136 x 350 1/2 x 175 1/4", 2006. Photo: John Kennard. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.

A half hemisphere, with a radius of about thirty feet, sits against a white wall arcing toward the ceiling. Its surface is covered with a thick, red wax and oil paint mixture, which is continually painted by the slow passage of a curved, steel plane. The substance is smoothed and abraded by the process over the curved form and splattered against the supporting wall. Called Past, Present, Future (2006), it is the largest sculpture in the ICA exhibition of the work of sculptor Anish Kapoor. Past, Present, Future gives the exhibition its name and serves as instruction regarding Kapoor's sculptural engagement with what may be called, Matters of Painting.

Born in Bombay, Kapoor is a London-based artist with a big international reach. Cloud Gate in Chicago and Sky Mirror in New York are two sculptures that have made a name for Kapoor in this country. These works, along with S-Curve (2006) in the ICA exhibition, engage the viewer by the attraction and inclusiveness of their curved mirror surfaces. Like conventional flat mirrors, their object identity is somewhat diminished in favor of the environments and figures they reflect. As curved, sculptural objects, their mirror surfaces reflect back a stylized, altered world. It is the seductiveness of the mirrored works that joins them to painting, particularly painting that relies upon illusions of depth or deepening spatial envelopes. As a reverse window, the mirror invites the viewer in; it beckons and is irresistible.

While the mirrored pieces invite entry into the work by incorporating the viewer's reflection (slipping the viewer in and out, stretching and compressing the body), other works play out a different-and somewhat darker-contest of interiority. My Body Your Body (1993) looks at first like a tall, deep purple-blue minimalist painting. However, My Body Your Body is a penetrated space, rather than a flat surface. Its surface opens to a smooth orifice that sinks deep into the wall itself. Unlike the mirrored pieces, it invites a nearly literal entry into a darkening and unmeasured void.

Anish Kapoor, S-Curve, polished steel, 85 1/4 x 384 x 48", 2006. Photo: John Kennard. Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

In its engagement with bodies and space, Kapoor's art has roots in Western painting. Caravaggio's The Supper at Emmaus (1601, London version) presents the moment when the resurrected Christ reveals himself to two of his followers in a pictured space that opens out to draw the viewer in. The Emmaus painting, with its Baroque mastery of light and shadow, is a space of allure and penetration. Kapoor's concave forms and surfaces suggest entry to spaces and conditions within. I say they suggest entry, because the real entries lead to artistic fictions of depth, whose boundaries lose visibility as deeper and darker penetration is only imagined.

Kapoor extends this sense of entry to the architectural context in which his work is presented. Just as the hole in My Body Your Body requires a penetration of the wall that supports it, other works explore reverse penetration or piercing. 1000 Names (1979-80) is a red-powdered, sharp, conical form with a spiral ramp that suggests a large screw piercing the gallery floor from below. A kind of pressure point into the space of the gallery from behind the wall becomes a smooth anatomical bulge in the aptly named, When I Am Pregnant (1992). Kapoor's sculptural concavities and convexities are soft thresholds of uncertainty about where reality and fiction join, similar to the collapsing pictorial boundaries Caravaggio employed to allow for an unfolding of the miraculous. The enigmatic Untitled (1998) is a large, white, bean-like object that might have stood alone as a sculptural presence, except that Kapoor uses it to support an illusion of a pale, gray rectangular space windowing an ambiguous void. The precise sides of the rectangular "window" contradict the organic object, while the opening reveals their impossible union. It is a beguiling thing to see, indeed, but it is also an object in the mode of a painting whose face diminishes its back.

As the mirrored and "holed" works imply a painting window of openness and entry, the pigment-dusted works assert color primacy as the color both reveals and covers form. The continual painting of Past, Present, Future insists on the constant interdependence of painting and painted thing, drawing attention to the vitality of building and un-building the surface with make-believe, robotic artistry. Kapoor's work is a pull-out-all-the-stops spectacle, sometimes grand and certainly "oh, wow" dramatic. Interactive and affirming, it is also an ephemeral art of curiously theatrical objects that catch the high- and lowlights of particular moments during which the audience, in search of something nearly like itself, suspends disbelief.

—David Raymond

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