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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.
We live within architectural spaces throughout our lives, 24/7. From the moment we open our eyes until we close them, the spaces we live in affect our lives and contribute to shaping who we are. They impact us physically, psychologically and monetarily. They contribute to our happiness or unhappiness.
While we can choose to eat healthily or to eat junk food, choose to listen to music we like, go to a museum or read a book, the spaces we live in – dwelling, work, streets – feed our subconscious at all times. Why is it that few people, besides professionals, “can see” architecture? The following video is a nine-minute jumpstart to better understand architecture.
There may be as many definitions of “What is Architecture?” as they are architects. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “the art or practice of designing and building structures and especially habitable ones.” Are the millions of dwellings around the world “architecture?”
The problem is not a semantic one. The point of “Architecture in a Nutshell” and of www.architectureawareness.com is to help more people to see. In a world where at least half of its population lacks essentials such as decent housing, schools, hospitals, open public spaces and institutions, architecture awareness can be a matter of survival. Even if all the world’s architects would be working 60–hour weeks, even if we would be using the best available technology at 100% efficiency, there’s no way we will be able to catch up in fixing the existing urban chaos while absorbing a population growth of about 80 million people per year. By or around 2050 we will be ten billion. And then?
It is a key issue today not just to inform people, but to change mindsets, so that many may learn how to help themselves and to contribute to the building of better environments. By combining architecture awareness with filmmaking knowledge, it is possible to help not only the consumers of architecture but also its generators – architects, institutions, government, educators – who are instrumental in the world’s betterment.
