Museum of Contemporary Art Australia opens Anish Kapoor exhibition

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia presents Anish Kapoor, an exhibition by the celebrated artist as part of the Sydney International Art Series.

Anish Kapoor, My Red Homeland, 2003. Wax and oil-based paint, steel arm and motor, D1200cm. © Anish Kapoor. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery.

Kapoor has created some of the world’s most ambitious and recognisable contemporary artworks, including, Orbit (2012), a 115-metre-high tower created for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, Leviathan (2011) for the Grand Palais in Paris, Cloud Gate (2004) in Millennium Park, Chicago, Sky Mirror (2006) for the Rockefeller Centre in New York and Marsyas (2002) for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.

In this selection of key works across two floors of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, you can encounter Kapoor’s powerful artworks up close and in-depth. Highlights include 1000 Names (1979-80), his early powdered pigment geometric sculptures; Void (1989), a large deep blue sculpture that changes from a convex to a concave form depending on your position; one of the artist’s most ambitious works, the 24-ton Memory (2008) which completely fills one of the MCA’s spacious galleries as if squeezed between the white walls; and the monumental My Red Homeland (2003), which replicates the role of the artist. In this enormous circular sculpture, a large motorised steel blade slowly cuts a course through 25 tons of red wax, endlessly dissecting and re-shaping it into new forms.

Influenced by both his Indian heritage and western philosophy, in particular metaphysics, Kapoor’s artworks seek to understand what it is to be human. Explore Kapoor’s interest in the relationship between the contrasting forces of light and dark and see how he uses colour, form, size and medium to challenge perception, developing immersive and sometimes unsettling experiences.

Discover how Kapoor’s continual experimentation with structure and medium has led him to work with a wide variety of materials from clay, fibreglass and paint pigment, to steel and wax, creating beautiful, strange and intriguing works that counter conventional ideas of art. – www.mca.com.au