Anish Kapoor.

Gaskell, Ivan

Institute of contemporary art, Boston MA May 30 * September 7, 2008

"Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future," the artist's first museum show in North America since 1992-93, offers a compact survey of his career to date: 14 works in a single spacious gallery. Kapoor is a cosmopolitan. Born in Bombay of an Indian father and an Iraqi mother, he moved in his youth to England, where he has remained. Kapoor's cosmopolitanism was clear when he first exhibited at Lisson Gallery in London during the early 1980s. I recall the thrill of his dense dry pigments evoking pulverized spices piled in Indian markets, or the colored dusts people hurl at one another during the Hindu spring festival, Holi. Some vivid powders--yellow, red, blue--coat the exteriors of groups of abstract sculptural forms, leaving a loose efflorescence at the base of each, as in the case of several early works, each with the title 1000 Names (1979-80), two of which are exhibited here. Other matte pigments darken apertures puncturing raw chunks of stone so that their depth is indiscernible. Whereas his older contemporary, German sculptor Ulrich Ruckriem, drills and splits the carcasses of monumental rocks in acts of petrous butchery, Kapoor surgically incises and deftly delves within rough boulders, leading the eye to the unfathomable depths of their seemingly still living interiority. I regret that no example of this kind of work, with which Kapoor made his reputation--such as Void Field (1989), which won Kapoor the Turner Prize in 1991--could be included, perhaps for practical reasons. The closest is My Body Your Body (1993), a blue rectangular form that appears affixed to a wall like a picture, but that reveals itself as an aperture from which a curvilinear form recedes into black obscurity.

Another work that refers to the human body is the highly accomplished When I am Pregnant (1992). This is a piece that repays close consideration, for it exemplifies the heights that Kapoor's art can attain, as well as some risks it runs. To the viewer standing immediately before it, this wall piece is scarcely discernible, for it is no more than an even, rounded swelling of that wall. Only when looking at it obliquely can the viewer make out the protrusion, enhanced by the carefully contrived fall of light creating shadows. At first, the title seems to suggest no more than a capricious anthropomorphism: a pregnant white gallery wall. Yet pregnancy is culturally loaded. As Kapoor relates in a conversation with curator Nicholas Baume published in the fetishistically designed catalogue, "I read somewhere that certain monks formally ask each other if they are pregnant yet, and that has to do with whether they have reached a state of spiritual accomplishment." So, for all its apparent whimsicality, the wall's swelling represents a spiritual state.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

In the Western tradition, spirituality in this context evokes the mystical pregnancy of the Virgin Mary. When I am Pregnant recalls another wall that in its very substance incorporates the swelling of a pregnancy: that of the church in Monterchi on which Piero della Francesca painted, in true fresco, the Madonna del Parto (ca. 1460). Piero's Virgin, her gown unfastened between sternumand groin, decorously displays a pregnant belly that is one with the wall. Kapoor's sculpture conjures a contemporary paragone: a new version of the Renaissance comparison between the respective representational capacities of painting and sculpture. Yet, in When I am Pregnant the enrichment is not only thematic, for in demonstrating the claims of sculpture to evoke a mystical state, Kapoor isolates its means of so doing in the very form he has chosen. A viewer moving in relation to the wall and its subtly rounded swelling recalls that Kapoor's sculptural predecessors have used the same form in complex compositions. For instance, Gian Lorenzo Bernini employed this very convexity to define the right cheek of the angel with the dart in his white life-size marble Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647-52) in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. By precisely isolating this constituent, Kapoor invites a meditative engagement with the peculiar character of its sculptural potential. He nimbly reconciles a consideration of the pregnancy of sculptural form with the representation of spiritual pregnancy.

The hint of weakness, though, is the vulnerability of When I am Pregnant--however physically engaging--to being thought intellectually whimsical. This is a recurrent problem in Kapoor's work. However, as several of the pieces in this exhibition demonstrate, it is one that he is regularly able to overcome by producing art that genuinely affords cosmopolitan, secular intimations of transcendence.