Anish Kapoor

Born in 1954 in Mumbai (India), he lives in Great Britain.

The internationally acclaimed artist Anish Kapoor represented Great Britain in Venice in 1990 and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1991. As both painter and sculptor, he uses the illusionistic capacities of colour to lend sensuality and ambiguity to his strictly geometric sculptures. He works matter, light and space by making use of void-solid, male-female, concave-convex, interiorexterior, material-immaterial, visible-invisible contrasts. This calculated ambiguity imbues his works which are becoming ever more monumental as time passes, with a quality of mystery and infinity.

My Red Homeland represents both a novel quality and a culmination in the artist's work. On view in the Picasso room at Les Abattoirs, a machine moves a horizontal metal arm which mixes 25 tons of red vaseline at a rate of one revolution per hour. Left to its mechanical solitude, the sculpture constructs itself and then undoes itself, leaving viewers in a disquieting face to face situation with matter in motion. The artist has withdrawn from the work. But the autonomy of this gigantic painting machine refers to the spiritual function which Anish Kapoor attributes to art, and which, by going back to his origins, he connects “with a very ancient aspect of Indian philosophy which talks of self-created objects, objects which appear by themselves”.