'An Inside Look at Anish Kapoor’s Next Act' - Smithsonian Magazine

30 October 2023

The famed sculptor brings his incendiary style—and fiery palette—to the canvas in a new studio in Venice

In a former boat repair workshop in Venice, down a narrow alley just off the Grand Canal dead-ending at the water’s edge, hides a space now used as a painting studio with Corinthian columns and skylights overhead. Towering canvases hang on every surface. Many more are stacked like dominoes in the corners. A bloody shade of red, the artist’s signature color, mixed from an oil paint base of alizarin crimson, is pervasive in the abstract work here.

“I’ve used it again and again and again and again,” says Anish Kapoor, the 69-year-old British Indian artist behind this particular hue, chatting in his newly occupied Venice studio in August. Kapoor has spent decades exploring the possibilities of this corporeal color, in three-dimensional objects forged from silicone, wax and other malleable materials and, increasingly, in gobs of thick paint on canvas.

Read in full via Smithsonian Magazine.