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Lara Grieve
Standing underneath Anish Kapoor's At the Edge of the World at the Hayward Gallery's 1998 exhibition of his work was a disorientating experience. The internal deep red pigment drew the viewer's gaze up into the huge dome-like structure, and, although the work was enclosed within the gallery space, there seemed to be no end to its comforting womb-like redness. The experience of such a piece is both unnerving and rewarding as it's a pure, spontaneous response rather than one learnt from the text on a gallery's wall.
"I think the real subject for me, if there is one, is the sublime…It's this whole notion of somehow trying to shorten the distance of sublime experience…If one is looking at a Friedrich of a figure looking at the sunset, then one is having one's reverie in terms of their experience...It is my wish to make that distance shorter so that the reverie is direct. You're not watching someone else do it, you're compelled to do it yourself." (Anish Kapoor in an interview with Martin Gayford, Modern Painters, Spring 2000)
An integral part of Kapoor's works is the viewer's mental response to their physical relationship with the sculptures. This can sometimes be influenced by the uncertainty over what is actually being viewed. For example his large works of fibreglass or stone often contain shapes of colour or tonal difference that look painted on but turn out on closer inspection to be areas cut away. The theme of duality connects the pieces: physical and mental, present and absent, form and non-form, light and dark, male and female.
Another piece, When I Am Pregnant, bulged seamlessly from the same gallery wall. It was strange and disconcerting, as if the inanimate structure of the building had grown organically. The eye-catching bump of uncertain parentage changed if the viewer stood square on, when, as if by magic, it disappeared, only a faint halo on the surface remembering its form. Kapoor was born in Bombay in 1954. In the 1970s he moved to London to study art at Hornsey College and then at Chelsea. His work has been exhibited around the world and is held in many public and private collections. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and a won the Turner Prize a year later.
One of his public works that has since been dismantled was the startling Taratantara, installed within the empty Baltic Flour Mills building in Gateshead. In 1999, before renovation of the site began, Kapoor created a 35m x 50m deep red PVC structure within the shell of the building - a living element giving form to the dead space.
Another public work was Parabolic Waters, commissioned to stand outside the Millennium Dome in 2000. On a much larger scale than a similar work shown at his exhibition at London's Lisson Gallery in the same year, it contained coloured liquid that was spun around at a fast enough rate to make it appear solid.
In April 2001 Kapoor's Sky Mirror was imnstalled outside the Nottingham Playhouse. The concave stainless steel mirror, six metres in diameter, reflects the way its surroundings change with the weather, offering each viewer an opportunity to see different images and have an individual response.
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