A great anthological exhibition questions the boundaries between plasticity and immateriality, interaction and meditation
On October 7th, an exhibition dedicated to the Anglo-Indian artist Anish Kapoor (Mumbai, 1954) opens in Palazzo Strozzi; an exhibition created by himself with the curator Arturo Galansino.
Starting from the title “Untrue Unreal,” Kapoor, back from the recent opening of the futuristic metro station in Naples, prepares the visitor for an immersive experience in an illusory dimension that forces them into an active attitude from a perceptive point of view, freed from the passive and anesthetized dimension of contemporary media and social networks. The anthological exhibition combines past and recent works, in which the boundary between plasticity and immateriality is questioned and develops through a dialectic between vision and illusion, interaction and meditation, concave and convex.
ON VIEW SCULPTED, SATURATED, POLISHED AND MANIPULATED MULTI-MATERIAL ARTWORKS ACCORDING TO THE PURPOSES
On view, there are multi-material artworks (pigment, steel, stone, wax, silicone) which are manipulated, sculpted, saturated, and polished according to the artist’s purposes. Kapoor, who works between London and Venice, has been in the international art scene since the 80s, when Great Britain - where he moved from the mid-70s - seems to be on the periphery of a map that is being structured in global form, dominated by the return to painting marked by movements such as transavant-garde, the Neue Wilden, street artists, and American stars. The artist, who in 1990 represented Great Britain at the La Biennale di Venezia and in 1991 won the prestigious Turner Prize, proves once again that art is a tool for stimulating reflection. He develops a peculiar expressive form that escapes critical and disciplinary categories, succeeding through experimentation to harmonize sculpture, painting, and architecture, held together by an attitude to model the syntax of space and to insert the concept of time into his artworks, which directly involve the observer.
Kapoor reiterates a poetics in which shape, size, and color (in 2016 he patented also a color, the “Vantablack”) become tools of reflection/meditation, because art is a specific type of understanding, tangent to the philosophical.
