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A Creative Giant
By Paran Balakrishnan
It will be a first even for sculptor Anish Kapoor. Earlier this year Kapoor who has been hailed as Britain’s greatest living sculptor, received an unusual request: the City of Naples wanted him to build a Metro station.
Kapoor first thought that the city fathers wanted him to decorate a new station with a few thought-provoking installations. He did a doubletake when he realised they were talking about the entire station. “It’s pretty mad,” he grinned at a coffee shop in Delhi, during a visit this week.
Kapoor has never been accused of lacking ideas, so now six months later, he’s turning his chisel to what could be his biggest project ever. He’s treating the entire station as a giant work of art. “I’m trying to make a piece of sculpture that you enter,” he says without missing a beat.
He has, of course, enlisted the help of architect friends in London, who’ll be putting together the key elements of the project. “It requires so much infrastructure. There are so many rules,” he says.
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In the early ’80s he was signed on by the powerful Lisson Gallery in London, which has the reputation of being able to turn newcomers into stars.
In 1986 renowned New York Time critic John Russell declared Kapoor “a bright young talent”, one of “six artists with a future”. And in 1991, his burgeoning reputation received a big boost when he won the Turner Prize, which even though or perhaps because it whips up controversy, is the top art award in Britain.
Why did the Naples city fathers fix their sights on Kapoor? Probably because he has been creating massive structures around Europe and, indeed, the world. Last year, he created a 150-metre sculpture that filled the cavernous Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London.
Marsyas, as the oeuvre was called, was Kapoor’s biggest piece ever. Says Kapoor: “The Turbine Hall is a giant space. Most earlier exhibits used one-third of it. I decided I would use the whole building. It was the only way I could make sense of it.”
Cut to the banks of Lake Michigan in Chicago. Next year a massive 25-metre long installation that’s higher than a house and made from stainless steel (it’s been nicknamed the Silver Bean) will go up in a newly-built city park.
Kapoor’s Silver Bean is being fabricated in Berkeley, California, will be shipped to Chicago in small pieces and assembled on site. But Kapoor, who works from a giant workshop in south London that looks more like an industrial shed, denies that he creates on a giant scale just for the sake of it. “Bigger isn’t better. Scale is one of the possible forces or energies,” says the 49-year-old artist.
What was it like to be an Indian in Britain? Certainly for Kapoor his Indian origin has not been a handicap. It’s around 30 years since Kapoor first went to Britain as a young student. Despite his achievements, though, he has never shaken off the image of being an ‘Indian’ artist. It’s a tag he shares with others like Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi.
Nevertheless, Kapoor is certainly an Establishment figure in the British art world, at least if his being awarded a CBE in June is anything to go by. He has an entry in in Debrett’s Peerage that runs to more than 60 lines listing his exhibits. The length of the list reflects his non-stop production pace. As soon as he dismantles one massive exhibit, then another piece seems to go up somewhere else.
But Kapoor acknowledges that while some of his sculptures are so huge they could nearly be called architecture, the Naples Metro is the largest project he has undertaken. He sees building the subway as a project that will not only be engineering work but an experience of passage, of travel — and ultimately of art.