Anish Kapoor at The Royal Academy of Arts Review by Lucie Charkin
The Royal Academy of Arts opened its doors today for a preview of Anish Kapoor’s solo exhibition. Two years in the making, this sculpture show brings together some thoughtfully selected earlier pieces with a series of new works. In a provocative exhibition that squeezes, amongst other things, 30 tonnes of blood red wax through the doors and onto the walls of this venerable art institution. This is a playful and sometimes bemusing arrangement of works that does manage to make you question the role of the institution, artist and you the viewer in the making of great works of art.
Entering the exhibition you are propelled directly into the gapping opening of the iron sculpture ‘Hive’, 2009. That presents itself like an oversized Alice in wonderland, huddled tightly against the four walls of its temporary home. It’s carefully massaged rusty exterior and smooth architectural interior mirror the geometric arrangement of the RAs light well over head that grandly lends the institutions tranquillity to this claustrophic start.
To the right of this opening piece two galleries link a series of Kapoor’s earlier installation works including White sand, Red millet, Many flowers, 1982 and When I am pregnant, 1992. In a new delicate relationship that repeats Kapoor’s mantra that what is absent in a work is just as important as the major presence of the larger steel pieces.
To the other side of our Hive entry point Kapoor busily pushes you into a spectacle of his new works in a humorous hall of mirrors that seem to again recall Alice’s adventures. In this room and in every reflective edge of each work you meet you, the viewer, reflected again and again. The first image you see is you entering the room in a Hitchcookesque rear view mirror shaped wave of stainless steel that is aptly called Vertigo. Step around it and in this view the room is turned upside down whilst you shrink and float in the space. Moving on None-Object ( Pole) 2008 sits like a pawn on a chess board playfully reflecting an image of you and everyone else into the gallery as stretched Giacometti sculptures haunting the historic galleries. Whilst Non Object (Door) splits your reflection squarely down the middle and has you wondering how the magician managed it with his clever techniques for bending reality and materials. All the while, as you resist the overwhelming desire to touch the works you are watched over by two of Kapoor’s signature reflective bowls the newest of which Turning the World Upside Down, 09 is gold plated gaudily presenting its worth as a collectible item.
After this physical play you are then plunged into the sublime glow of ‘Yellow’, 1999. A refreshing work of happy yellow pigment pressed like a giant droplet of paint into a wall of the gallery. Yellow seems to call out for a link to the metaphysical questions asked by the great masters whose works have hung on the Royal Academy’s walls before it. As hard benches invite you to sit and contemplate the work this gallery is also made to feel like the waiting room that comes just before the psycho-drama of the Shooting into the Corner, 2008-09.
Like the more graceful Svayambh, 2007 Shooting the Corner, employs wax, time and power to make it work in the space. A strange canon sits alongside a wall of wax bullets waiting to catch the enemy unaware. Every twenty minutes a black boiler suited attendant dutifully performs the silent ritual of filling the paint canon. Pistons sound, pressure builds and then just as you have started to drift off with the hum of the engine ‘bang ‘ a red wax bullet shots across the room defecating the white walls and gilded stucco of the museum with blood red wax. In an action that recalls the lead throwing of fellow Brit artist Richard Serra.
All this active heavy human control is then taken away completely by the autonomous glacial movement of the electrically powered wax door way Svayambh which ploughs on like the angel of history through the gallery walls leaving its blood red smears like toil of the artist in its wake.
On reflection, no pun intended, whilst some moments in the show seem a little too contrived it could be argued that in his clever use and misuse of the RA’s galleries Kapoor has allowed himself to edge a little closer towards his personal goal of inventing ‘a new space’ with his art.
The Anish Kapoor exhibition opens to the public on Saturday and runs through until December 11.
