Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay, India in 1954. He moved to London in the 1970s, and lived and worked there since. In 1980s, when identity politics, post-modernism and post-colonialism were heatedly discussed, Kapoor emerged in the art world with his "1000 Names" - through minimalist abstract appearance, the monochromatic forms of the works that fall between objects and non-objects showed the artist’s meticulous practice that moved freely between concrete reality and sub-consciousness.

From monochrome geometry, sandstone sculpture, mirrored stainless steel to large-scale PVC sculpture and auto-generated installation, Kapoor’s works rarely show the physical being of the artist. "I've always felt the hand of the artist is overrated. I want to deny the hand.” This is reflected not only in the way the artist, with saturated colors that break away from materiality, directed his work at the internal existence prior to words or thought, but also in a series of generated (like "When I am Pregnant") and generating (like "Svayambhu"), as well as the machinery production mode both as generator and witness: the complicated fabrication process filtered individual memories from the artist’s hand, leading to an object in its perfect, unrestrained, innate status. Along with the concealing hand of the artist, the traces of self-production of the object are revealed, and eventually liberated at the goal of the production line. “I insist the form made itself.”

Perfection and ambiguity co-exist in Kapoor’s works. Be it "1000 Names", geometries in the size of daily objects that emerge from the ground like tips of icebergs, or "Memory", blinding occupation of the limited museum space with giant corten steel objects, a visualized, concrete illusion shows Kapoor’s pursuit of the infinitive negative form beyond the positive form. Like the artist has always rejected empowering his works by creating large-scale “serial” works, his works appear in a self-generated status in their horizontal extension, whereas the audience have always been reading them from the “middle”.