Anish Kapoor at Gladstone Gallery

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by artist Anish Kapoor. This suite of monumental sculptures will encompass two galleries and inaugurate Gladstone’s second location at 530 West 21st Street. In his continual search for manifestations of the sublime, Kapoor explores the expressive properties of various materials and their relationship to form. The dynamic interplay between the work of art and its surroundings make the viewer a vital catalyst initiating the latent sensual capabilities of sculpture. In this exhibition of new works, Kapoor reconfigures both purity and earthiness in materials as divergent as polished stainless steel and dyed wax. Working in a scale simultaneously monumental and intimate, these sculptures convey both technological feats and the haptic qualities of craft. Kapoor’s fascination with the optical phenomenology of surfaces extends to what is below and beyond. As he has said, he strives for his materials to be able “to make something else possible… the non-physical things, the intellectual things, the possibilities that are available through the material.” His wrought surfaces only flourish in negating their own limitations, while expanding innumerable possibilities in the mind of the viewer. Using highly polished stainless steel and vibrant colors, Kapoor draws upon the wonder and passions of the sublime, and our capabilities to see the very fibers of our ontology. Despite the new materials and techniques that he continually investigates, his work never strays from its mythological grounding, as if the experience of viewing contemplates both established history and a subjective present. In the undulating curves of form, in the passions elicited from the manipulation of material, Kapoor’s sculptures stem from a universal experience of the world, while offering a wholly new vision of it. As Homi Bhabha wrote, Kapoor’s works become a “living tissue, a contingent and relational medium,” that seek to elevate the act of viewing to the level of spiritual awakening. Anish Kapoor, born in 1954 in Bombay, India, has lived and worked in London since 1973. Solo exhibitions include Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela; Hayward Gallery, London; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Fondazione Prada, Milan; DePont Foundation, Tilburg; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples; and recently at Haus der Kunst, Munich. In 1990 he was awarded the Premio Duemila for representing Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, and received the Turner Prize in 1991. Later this month, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, will mount his first East coast solo exhibition of work from the past fifteen years, which will then travel to the Seattle Art Museum. Cloudgate, his monumental permanent sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park, will soon be joined by a stone monument in New York’s Hanover Square for the British Memorial Garden, commemorating the British victims of 9/11. Gallery hours: Tuesday through Saturday, 10am - 6pm For further information please contact Eric Nylund [email protected] http://www.gladstonegallery.com/