News | Friday, 22nd June 2018

School of Art academic co-curates major international Anish Kapoor exhibition

Alnoor Mitha has helped to exhibit the Turner Prize winning sculptor's work

White Sand, Red Millet, many Flowers
White Sand, Red Millet, many Flowers (Anish Kapoor)

A major exhibition of Anish Kapoor, one of the most internationally renowned artists of the past four decades, has been co-curated by a Manchester School of Art academic.

The exhibition at Galleri F 15 in Moss, Norway, features a range of the Turner Prize winning sculptor’s most recognisable works.

Alnoor Mitha, Senior Research Fellow in Asian Cultures at Manchester School of Art, has helped to put the comprehensive exhibition together.

Important early works

It showcases some of Kapoor’s most important earlier works from Arts Council and British Council collections, presented alongside the monumental Sky Mirror (2018) from the artist’s studio which will be displayed in the gallery’s gardens. The exhibition will bring together beguiling sculptures from some of the diverse materials Kapoor works in, from pigment, stone, mirror and prints to gouache drawings.

Sky Mirror (Anish Kapoor)

Alnoor Mitha said: “Our curatorial aim and ambition was to show a comprehensive exhibition that brought together important earlier works going back four decades.

“We wanted to show a coherent body of Kapoor’s work from the diverse sculptural languages he has discovered.

“We hope that our audiences, like ourselves, will be mesmerised by the sheer exuberance of colour and the dualities of ‘being and nothingness’ that Kapoor offers.

“This exhibition brings together seminal works and presents Kapoor’s unique aesthetic sensibility to sculptural form that has made him one of the most prolific and important artists of our generation.”

Background

Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai before moving to London in the early 1970s, studying at Chelsea School of Art and Design.

He first rose to prominence in the late 1970s with his seminal works collectively titled 1000 Names. These mysterious geometric and organic forms appear as if formed of pure coloured pigment, their illusory nature placing them in a liminal state of form and potential formlessness.

A notable example of this body of work, White Sand, Red Millet, Many Flowers’ (1982), will be on display at the Galleri F 15 show. These early works both intimate and architectural, were a pivotal discovery and a defining moment in Kapoor’s practice.

The Chant of Blue (Anish Kapoor)

Kapoor, who won the Turner Prize in 1991, is perhaps best known for his landmark public sculptures across the world.  These include Cloud Gate (2004) in Chicago's Millennium Park, Sky Mirror (2006), Temenos (2010) in Middlesbrough, Leviathan at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2011, and Orbit, commissioned as a permanent artwork for London's Olympic Park and completed in 2012.

This exhibition brings together seminal works and presents Kapoor’s unique aesthetic sensibility to sculptural form that has made him one of the most prolific and important artists of our generation.

Mitha has curated the exhibition along with Dag Aak Sveinar , Director of Punkt Ø.

Exhibition ‘Anish Kapoor’ opens at Galleri F 15 in Moss, Norway with a press preview on Friday June 29, and runs until October 14.

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