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Anish Kapoor is known as one of the world’s great living artists. Since he won the Premio Duemila Prize at the 44th Venice Biennale back in 1990, his sculptural installations had a significant presence in many cities, including London, at the Tate Modern, Paris, at the Grand Palais, and Jerusalem, at the Israel Museum.
“Double S-Curve,” Regen Projects Gallery
“Double S-Curve,” Regen Projects Gallery
“Double S-Curve” – Angle
“Double S-Curve” – Angle
“Double S-Curve” – Detail
Passing Bus
“Double S-Curve” – Angle
Go Pro Selfie
Anish Kapoor was born in Mumbai in 1954 to an Iraqi-Jewish daughter of a rabbi who immigrated to India from Baghdad with her family when she was an infant. His Punjabi Hindu father was a hydrographer for the Indian Navy. This mixed and complex background had a powerful influence in his attraction to dualities: concave and convex, matter and void, light and darkness, negative and positive, earth and sky, mind and body. The range of materials he uses and pushes to their limits is astonishing: stone, steel, concrete, fabrics. Many of his projects are at an architectural scale. He collaborated with architects Frank Gehry in Chicago’s Millenial Park, Arata Isozaki in Japan, and engineer Cecil Balmond at the ArcelorMittal Orbit in London’s Olympic Park.
Although his reflective artworks in highly polished stainless steel are easily recognizable, it would be a mistake to pigeon-hole Kapoor into this style only. His crude artworks in sculptural painting and amorphous concrete tell us of an artist in continuous research for new forms of expression.
“Tall Tree and the Eye,” London
“Tall Tree and the Eye,” London – Detail
“Cloud Gate” at the Millenium Park, Chicago
“Arcelor Mittal Orbit” at London’s Olympic Park
“Arcelor Mittal Orbit” – Detail
“Marsyas,” Tate Modern, London
“Leviathan,” Grand Palais, Paris
“Leviathan,” Grand Palais, Paris
“Art Nova Inflatable Concert Hall,” Japan – With architect Arata Isozaki
“Monadic Singularity,” Beijing
“Turning the World Upside Down,” Israel Museum, Jerusalem
“Dismemberment of Joan d’Arc,” Buenos Aires
At Gladstone Gallery, New York
Printed Cement, Lisson Gallery
Printed Cement, Detail
Wax Canon at the Royal Academy of Arts, London
Sculptural painting detail at the MACRO Museum, Rome
The exhibit of Kapoor’s stainless-steel Double S-Curve at the Regen Projects gallery in Hollywood is good art news for Southern California.
Rendering of Academy Museum. Courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop
The work-in-progress of the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, designed by architect Renzo Piano, is scheduled for opening in 2019. In “Architecture + Cinema + Hollywood”, the three are connected through images of the museum’s construction at the present time, historic and contemporary examples of architecture, mementos from classic movies, metaphors of Hollywood, and segments from my previous films.
We live immersed in architectural spaces throughout our lives. Filmmaking tells us stories through space, light, motion and human scale. The Acadamy Museum of Motion Pictures offers an opportunity to make tangible the connection between the two sisters’ arts.
Both crafts have many things in common. They both are realized with the help of a team guided by a creator. On both disciplines, a spatial sequence is critical. In architecture, we perceive space as we move. In cinema, the spatial movement comes to us linearly, as may have been defined through editing.
Both disciplines interact with the other arts. Both must control sound, operate at different scales and deal with significant costs for their realization. Both create stages, one for everyday life, the other as a background for a story.
Architecture’s fundamental difference lays in its materiality. It deals with the law of gravity and with the nature of materials: strength, weight, texture, color, shape, durability. Yet the thinking process of architectural design and filmmaking is the same: we first dream, then we program/script, then we design/shoot, then we build/edit and finally we occupy/distribute. Criticism follows!
Architect Renzo Piano
Prof. Bruno Zevi
What does the museum’s “program/script” tell us? There are two main components: exhibitions and movie screenings. The exhibitions will be housed within the 1939 May Co. building, at the corner of Fairfax Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard. The main screenings will be presented in the new 1,000-seat state of the art theater.
To emphasize the contrast between the existing building and the theater, Piano chose to formalize the later with a sort of molded sphere “suspended in space,” mostly cantilevered, standing on mayor pillars. This approach reminds me both Michelangelo’s structural support of Saint Peter’s dome and John Johansen’s Mummers Theater in Oklahoma City, more than Bucky Fuller’s dome.
The overall context couldn’t be more eclectic. Within the LACMA campus, old and new “connect” only by adjacency. Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass” , reminding us that we are still standing on the Earth, is in total contrast with everything else. The Petersen Automotive Museum, at the opposite corner of the intersection, wraps around with metal ribbons a Bernard Tschumi-like red box, bringing to the scene a sort of caricature of adaptive-reuse. In a way, the whole area represents ultimate Los Angeles’ exiting disjunctions.
Using filmmaking techniques to communicate architecture, short of providing the physical experience of moving through space, can bring to the viewer much more than a succession of single frames. It can create associations with other places or stories, it allows for multiple perceptions in seconds, it can use drawings, photography, and art to illustrate a point. The film at the top of this blog tries to express that.
Central St. Giles Court, London
Weltstadthaus Köln
Metropolis Poster
The Shard, London
The Shard, London
The Shard, London
Marilyn Monroe, “Some Like It Hot” (1959)
Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, “La Dolce Vita” (1960)
Marina Abramovic Scene at “The Great Beauty.” (2014)
