Celebrated for his gigantic, stainless steel Cloud Gate sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Anish Kapoor is changing the cultural environment with his public works.
The Indian-born, London-based artist represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale and took home the 1991 Turner Prize with his monochromatic, pigment-covered, abstract forms. Since then, he’s carved mysterious cavities in stone, made massive wax installations, and fabricated shiny concave disks — like the enormous Sky Mirror in New York’s Rockefeller Center — that dynamically reflect their surroundings.
Anish Kapoor, he of The Bean in Chicago and the sky mirror at Rockefeller Center, has an eponymous show opening at the Royal Academy of Arts in London on September 26, and he’s launching it with a literal bang. His piece “Shooting Into the Corner,” featured in the exhibition, is a cannon shooting red wax projectiles at regular intervals into, yes, a corner of the gallery space. The wax will build up over the course of the exhibition — on display until December 11 — creating a one-off sculpture. A Turner Prize winner in 1991, Kapoor’s large-scale public installations have garnered the most attention in his decades-long career, though we’d hazard to guess that firing pigments from a cannon into a gallery will come in close second.
