Anish Kapoor - Buy or sell works

Anish Kapoor is considered to be one of the world’s most important sculptors of his generation.

 

Kapoor’s large, spectacular installations in public spaces are famous, including his piece ‘Orbit’, created as a landmark of the London 2012 Olympic Games, or ‘Dirty Corner’ in Versailles in 2015.

 

upside down and inside out

 

Kapoor was born in Mumbai, India on 12 March 1954. His father was an Indian Hindu, and his mother a Jewish Iraqi. As a teenager, Kapoor moved to a kibbutz in Israel, while his art studies later took him to England and India.

 

He now lives in London, and his abstract yet poetic sculptures are mostly conceived in series. They always align with the location in question and involve the viewer, be it in the form of convex and concave mirrors that distort, swallow or reflect surfaces and surroundings, or large-scale sandstone sculptures.

 

‘My art is upside down and inside out,’ says Anish Kapoor. His groupings of works include creations made from wax enriched with red pigments, which can be viewed as a contemporary reverence to ancient cultures. In Austria, Kapoor caused a sensation in 2009 with the installation ‘Shooting into the corner’ at the Museum of Applied Arts, in which prefabricated wax projectiles were shot at the wall of the museum using catapults. The sculpture created by this process grew to a weight of 20 tons over the course of the exhibition. 

 

The indeterminacy of boundaries and the vagueness of spatial coordinates, and the frequent hollows, are also a determining factor in Anish Kapoor’s stone and marble sculptures. This also applies, for example, to his sculpture Pouch, an example of the artist’s sculptures and mirror objects which have been sold at Dorotheum in recent years.

 

“I have made works that are holes in the floor, that are directly, if you like, the falling – but that falling doesn’t have to be downwards. The falling in some curious way could also be towards a horizon or even upwards. Vertigo is at the centre of this though – disorientation.” (A Conversation. Anish Kapoor with Donna de Salvo, in: Anish Kapoor. Marsyas, London: Tate Publishing, 2002, p. 62)

 

Kapoor, who was knighted in 2013 and since then has held the title of Sir, was Britain’s representative at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990, received the Turner Prize in 1991 and exhibited at documenta IX in 1992.

 

Mirror of eternity

 

In 2020, he is using sculptures and mirrors to put the British country estate Houghton Hall in dialogue with culture and nature. The exhibition, sponsored by Dorotheum, brings together works from a span 40 years and is the artist’s largest outdoor sculpture show to date.

 

The exhibition was designed by Mario Codagnato, who also curated Damian Hirst’s exhibition, also sponsored by Dorotheum, two years earlier.

Anish Kapoor, Sky Mirror (2018) and Eight Eight (2004) © Anish Kapoor. All rights reserved, DACS 2020

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