Anish Kapoor. Untrue Unreal

Starting from October 7, 2023 Palazzo Strozzi in Florence is pleased to announce a new major exhibition devised and produced with Anish Kapoor, celebrated artist who has revolutionised the notion of sculpture in contemporary art. Curated by Arturo Galansino, Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, the show will feature monumental installations, intimate environments and thought-provoking forms that will forge an original and captivating dialogue with the architecture and audience of Palazzo Strozzi.

With a wide selection of historical and recent works, the exhibition is designed to offer an open invitation to engage in a direct interaction with Kapoor’s art in its versatility, discord, entropy and ephemerality. Palazzo Strozzi becomes a venue at once concave and convex, whole and yet fragmented, in which visitors are called on to question their senses.

Kapoor’s works merge empty and full space, absorbing and reflecting surfaces, geometrical and biomorphic forms. The artist explores space and time, the interior and the exterior, urging us to probe in the first person the limits and potential of our relationship with the world around us and to reflect on perceived dualities such as body and mind, nature and artifice.

One of the distinguishing features is the way Kapoor’s works transcend their materiality. Pigment, stone, steel, wax and silicone, to name only a few of the materials he works with, are manipulated – carved, polished, saturated and formed – to the point of a dissolution of boundaries between the plastic and the immaterial. Color in Kapoor’s hands is not simply matter and hue, but becomes an immersive phenomenon containing its own spatial and illusive volume.

Kapoor has established himself since the 1980s as one of the most important artists in the international arena, shunning categorisation and distinguishing himself by his unique visual language that embraces painting, sculpture and architectural form. His work sparks amazement and uneasiness, destabilizing our perception and creating space and form in which to experience and think both the known and unknown.

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Anish Kapoor

Born in Mumbai, India in 1954, Anish Kapoor has lived and worked in London since studying sculpture at Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea College of Art in the mid-seventies. More recently dividing his time between studios in London and Venice.

His works are permanently exhibited in the most important collections and museums around the world from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Tate in London; the Prada Foundation in Milan and the Guggenheim Museums in Venice, Bilbao and Abu Dhabi. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Galleria dell’Accademia di Venezia & Palazzo Manfrin, Venice, Italy (2022); Modern Art Oxford, UK (2021); Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK (2020); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2020); Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum and Imperial Ancestral Tempie, Beijing (2019); Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires (2019); Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Porto, Portugal (2018); University Museum of Contemporary Art (MUAC), Mexico City (2016); Chateau de Versailles, France (2015); Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow, (2015); Gropius Bau, Berlin (2013); Sakip Sabanci Muzesi, Istanbul (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2012).

Anish Kapoor represented Great Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990 where he was awarded the Premio Duemila Prize. In 1991 he won the Turner Prize and has gone on to receive numerous international awards and honours.

Also renowned for his architecturally scaled works, public projects include: Cloud Gate (2004), Millennium Park, Chicago, USA; Leviathan (2011) exhibited at Monumenta, Paris, France; Orbit (2012), Oueen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London; Ark Nova, an inflatable concert hall created for Lucerne Festival, Japan (2013); Descension (2014) most recently installed in Brooklyn Bridge Park, New York, USA (2017) and the soon to be completed Traiano and Universitá Monte St Angelo Metro Stations, Naples, Italy (2002–2023).

Cover:
Anish Kapoor
To Reflect an Intimate Part of the Red, 1981
Mixed media and pigment
Photograph Oliver Santanaue © Anish Kapoor. All rights reserved SIAE, 2023

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