Anish Kapoor at Barbara Gladstone - New York - Brief Article

Entering Anish Kapoor's exhibition of five new works, viewers could not help but smile as they came upon a luminously red sculpture that looked like a huge pair of lips, a stainless-steel form hanging by steel cables from the ceiling. Like many of the large-scale pieces that the artist has produced since 1995, Turned Into the Interior is captivating for the ways it dematerializes matter with light, disrupts space within and outside the object, and calls into question the trustworthiness of one's sensory perceptions. At once cold and gleaming, solid and incorporeal, the lacquer surfaces of these sculptures are less the "covering" of the object than qualities of color, light and darkness incarnate.

Distorted reflections of the surrounding gallery, other peopie and viewers themselves are visible in the dazzling, sensuous surfaces of Kapoor's glossy sculptures even as their forms dissolve in a dance between light and shadow. One peered inside Turned Into the Interior, discovering an ambiguous oral/vaginal orifice whose contours and depth resisted coming into focus. This interior void read as a tonsil or penile protuberance on the exterior. In an untitled work, a large breastlike protrusion appeared to grow organically out of a freestanding wall, brushing up against the opposite, structural wall with its fullness. As one stood before the excavated cavity of this 8-by-12-foot sculpture, light was refracted by and reflected in the fiberglass surface. Again, one's perceptions of surface and depth were uncertain. One seemed to be on the edge of a precipice, struggling against the urge to fall into the abyss. In the same gallery, Vein marked a noteworthy departure from Kapoor's use of sensuous materials. He pierced the wall of the gallery itself to make two apertures. The bottom hole was built out into a lip to catch reddish liquid that dripped with a painterly effect down the wall from the other opening, 5 feet above.

From the hushed intimacy of the color-saturated, pigment works for which he became internationally known in the '80s to the recent sexy and extroverted mirrored-surface pieces, Kapoor has continued his investigations of the viewer's gaze and of the dichotomy between interior and exterior in abstract, monolithic forms. Theatrical, seductive and enigmatic, the new sculptures continue to engage and subvert the act of looking.

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group