Art as the succession of a mental paradox. Form and content oppose common opinion, the everyday, with surprise and bizarreness. Art as a discussion of tangible and intelligible reality, a philosophical strand in which the aesthetics of materials take on new meanings. What is real and what is true? Questions of being and becoming in relation to forms and colors, environments and architectures, senses and experience.
Anish Kapoor, Untrue Unreal, Void Pavilion VII, 2023, mixed media, paint, 750 x 750 x 750 cm, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2023, courtesy the artist and the foundation, photo by Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio
«I do not wish to address with my sculpture problems related to form, but issues pertaining to faith, passion, experience, which goes beyond material concerns». This is how Anish Kapoor (world-renowned Indian sculptures born in ’54) presents his work in its most concrete form. «A painter who is a sculptor», as he often calls himself, does not need extensive descriptions, not only because of his celebrity in the contemporary, but precisely because his art does not need extreme explanations. Everything he talks about with sculpture is inherent in the human intellect, in the relationship with the other that does not necessarily have to be physical, but also mediumistic. Kapoor invokes philosophical and existential questions, in a spiritual dimension between life, origin, infinity, emptiness, between Eastern and Western culture. It is an art that is based on bringing into play tensions between contrasting forces: inner and outer, positive and negative, empty and full, light and shadow, material and immaterial. This dynamic relationship is acted on the physical characteristics of the materials used, scale, volume and color, having as a fundamental term of comparison the relationship with the audience.
Anish Kapoor, Untrue Unreal, Angel, 1990, slate, pigment, variable dimensions, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2023, courtesy the artist and the foundation, photo by Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio
Within the Renaissance architecture of Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, in the rooms of the piano nobile and the courtyard, in a not exactly chronological progression, the works by Anish Kapoor follow one another in the exhibition entitled Untrue Unreal. Historical and recent works, under the curatorial guidance of general director Arturo Galansino, trace the sculptor’s revolutionary thinking in a dialogic and engaging setting. The exhibition is a kind of contemporary hyperuranium, more intellectual than tangible, a metaphysical dimension between timelessness and non-spatiality, where the improbable meets the unreal as the title suggests. It is a game of questioning, sensory disorientation, elective and conditional. Works like Svayambhu and Endless Column – a block of red wax and a column of red pigment, respectively – shape matter by altering concepts of container and content, reflecting in spheres more ethereal than concrete.
Anish Kapoor, Untrue Unreal, Gathering Clouds, 2014, fiberglass paint, paint, 188 x 188 x 39 cm (each), Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2023, courtesy the artist and the foundation, photo by Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio
If in this sense the outer space comes to be modified in its horizontal and vertical motions, leading the gaze toward the beyond, it is in the mirror objects Vertigo, Mirror and Newborn that the gaze is internalized, reflected in objecthood and subjecthood with an illusory and undefined dichotomy. These concave, convex and circular sculptures are inspired by Brâncusi’s formal experiments in which what is mirrored could disprove the main laws of physics. And here the three spatial dimensions that identify the Parmenidian being can seemingly cancel and invert. The most emblematic example here is surely the use of Vantablack (which absorbs more than 99.9 percent of visible light) for works such as Non-Object Black – mirroring those included in the site-specific cube in the courtyard Void Pavillion VII – and Gathering Clouds, leading the transcendence of thought into a meditative darkness.
Anish Kapoor, Untrue Unreal, installation view (Svayambhu, 2007, Endless Column, 1992) Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, 2023, courtesy the artist and the foundation, photo by Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio
Anish Kapoor continues his sculptural quest with great attention to transcending formal limits, to question what is reality in favor of an immaterial and contemplative imagery. There an esoteric and spiritual matrix remains, that induces the viewer to reexamine his or her own everydayness. It is unspeakable in its thought because it is the conductor of differentiated and at the same time unitary feelings and experiences. Palazzo Strozzi gives act of unquestionable elegance to its research by including this exhibition in the continuous itinerary of the great protagonists of contemporary art. Perhaps with the arrival of the new year we could expect fresh air from the Florentine front, closing this cycle of several years of Galansian artists’ direction, to address a “younger” artistic research.
Info:
Anish Kapoor. UNTRUE UNREAL
07/10/2023 – 04/02/24
curated by Arturo Galansino
Palazzo Strozzi
Piazza degli Strozzi, Firenze (FI)
www.palazzostrozzi.org
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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