the art collectors

Friday, June 5th, 2009

There Will Be Blood – Anish Kapoor to Fill Royal Academy

Anish Kapoor – Svayambh, 2007 at Le Musée des Beaux Arts. Image: Exporevue

This coming September, London’s Royal Academy of Arts will host a major exhibition by acclaimed sculptor, Anish Kapoor, representing the first time the main exhibition galleries will be filled by a living contemporary artist. Here, Kapoor will present several new works, alongside signature pieces representing his accomplished career. The exhibition’s focal point will be Svayambh (Sanskrit for self-born), a site specific work comprised of mammoth block of red wax that slowly trudges along on motorized tracks, morphing to the shape of the gallery arches it passed through and staining the walls along the way. An earlier version of the piece debuted at Le Musée des Beaux Arts in 2007. Also on display will be Shooting Into the Corner, a new work that sees an air-powered cannon continually firing red pellets of wax at a wall.

The pieces represent Kapoor’s recent exploration of art that is both transient and self-generating. In an interview for Tate Magazine, the artist noted, “I am interested in sculpture that manipulates the viewer into a specific relation with both space and time. Time, on two levels; one narratively and cinematically as a matter of the passage through the work, and the other as a literal elongation of the moment.”

Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy of Arts opens September 26 and runs till December 11, 2009.

Image: The Royal Academy of Arts