The exhibition, which includes about 60 works, has retrospective elements alongside newer bodies of work, presenting key moments in the artist’s career. Ground-breaking new works, created using carbon nanotechnology, are shown for the first time, as well as recent paintings and sculptures that are testament to the vitality and visionary nature of Kapoor’s current practice.
This interaction of science and art has created works that sit within an age-old language of painting, that alongside installations like Shooting into the Corner (2008–2009) and new paintings enter a complex dialogue with the Gallerie dell’Accademia’s historical collection. Perhaps more explicitly than ever, this exhibition looks to a language of the interior that has always been central to Kapoor’s practice. In Pregnant White Within Me (2022) the architecture of the gallery is distended, suggesting a re-shaping of the boundaries between body, building and being. Throughout the exhibition Kapoor’s works absorb and extend the space within and around them into uncanny realms, transforming the rooms of the Gallerie dell’Accademia into sites for the magical – going beyond the display of objects
The two-part exhibition continues with Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022) turning the world upside down at the entrance to the historic Palazzo Manfrin, where some of the most famous works in the Gallerie dell’ Accademia’s collection originally hung. This pendulous mass leads visitors through to a set of rooms in the unfinished building featuring works from throughout the career of the artist; the painting triptych Internal Objects in Three Parts (2013– 2015), as well as White Sand Red, Millet Many Flowers (1982). A series of mirror works invert and distort the viewer. Heaven, hell, earth and sea are invoked in works such as Turning Water Into Mirror, Blood into Sky (2003) and Destierro (2017), an epic act of displacement. The central installation Symphony for a Beloved Sun (2013) submerges the historic venue in the primal colour and the stuff of life and death.
Anish Kapoor said: “It’s a huge honour to be invited to engage with the collections at the Gallerie dell’ Accademia in Venice, perhaps one of the finest collections of classical painting anywhere in the world. All art must engage with what went before. The Accademia presents a wonderful and wondrous challenge. I feel a deep commitment to Venice, its architecture and its support for the contemporary arts.”
Anish Kapoor
Turning Water into Mirror, Blood into Sky 2003
Steel, water, motor
150 x 300 x 300 cm
59 x 118 x 118 in
Anish Kapoor
Turning Water into Mirror, Blood into Sky 2003
Steel, water, motor
150 x 300 x 300 cm
59 x 118 x 118 in
Taco Dibbits said: “Kapoor creates works that are happening as we experience them. Throughout all of the spaces of this exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia and Palazzo Manfrin, there is process and temporality on display and in action. These works exist in a continuous state of becoming, we are invited to witness these objects at just one moment in the process of their generation or de-generation.”
