September 2010

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Charles Saumarez Smith opened the press preview on the forthcoming Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, by announcing that despite the economic climate and its enormous impact on gallery budgets, and in contrast to his experience of state-funded galleries, he had enjoyed the relative freedom of raising funds for a private institution.

Necessary funds for the show, he added, which opens at the end of September, ‘were very nearly there’. Saumarez Smith was also keen to point out that this was a landmark show for the Royal Academy as it will be the first time that a living artist has occupied all of the main galleries.

I asked Anish Kapoor what his experience had been in setting up the Royal Academy exhibition compared to his last major retrospective in London at the Hayward gallery in 1998, as I was curious about the ideological, physical and economic differences between then and now, and between the two institutions. Anish Kapoor’s revealingly succinct answer was: ‘I’ve not come across any problems at all’.

The Hayward exhibition was a landmark for both the institution and the artist. Kapoor was free to impose radical physical changes to the gallery, and by creating new surfaces, walls and spaces he facilitated the purpose and impact of his art. Many works were not stand alone pieces but appeared to grow out of, or penetrate, the very space that would otherwise contain them. Kapoor transformed the gallery space so radically that the Hayward itself became a work of art.

Kapoor explained the difference between the Hayward show and the forthcoming RA exhibition commenting, ‘[The Hayward] had at its heart a preoccupation towards an incredible space, out of reach, out of focus, 11 years later at the heart of this show is a preoccupation with the sublime. Since abstract expressionism, there is a sense that the sublime can be engaged with only through fuzzy space, well this is a new proposition’.

One of Anish Kapoor's famous spatial-disruptors, Svayambh, will consume five rooms of the Royal Academy. The 40 ton, 3x2 metre block (which sits on a track) squeezes back and forth through doorways narrower than itself, leaving behind its own waxy red residue. This piece, he said, articulates ‘a fiction that I have worked with for 20 years. The notion that they are made without a hand, is profoundly mysterious’.

Shooting into the corner (above) also uses red wax, this time in the form of 15 kilo cannon balls which will be fired loudly into the corner of the room. Kapoor calls it a ‘psycho-drama’, as the piece evolves over its three month installation. He hopes it will be provocative on many levels: ‘In a violent world at least one set of meaning is obvious, but I am also interested in the virtual arena, exploring ideas like the cliché of painting, the making of a mark as a violent act’.

When someone queried his repetitious use of red, Kapoor explained that it was not an exclusive colour for him: ‘Turner was preoccupied with colour in the way that colour becomes light, mine is the way that colour becomes dark. Red creates a much darker dark than blue or even black’.

Anish Kapoor, although a Royal Academician himself since 1999, appeared sincere in his expression of both affection and awe at the latest space he is set to overwhelm. ‘These are the most incredible rooms perhaps in the world let alone London... they give sculpture a wondeful space, great diginity, great light, I couldn’t have asked for more’.

Anish Kapoor - Main Galleries
26 September - 11th December 2009
Royal Academy, London

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