Anish Kapoor

Name: Anish Kapoor
Start: 2023-11-02T00:00:00.000+00:00
End: 2023-12-22T00:00:00.000+00:00
Location: 504 + 508 West 24th Street

New York, 2 November – 22 December 2023

This November, across both of Lisson Gallery’s New York locations, Anish Kapoor presents an exhibition of new and recent works, following his highly acclaimed career-spanning survey at the Gallerie dell’Accademia and the Palazzo Manfrin in Venice last year. The exhibition brings together never before seen standalone sculptures and large-scale installations, presenting for the first time in an exhibition in New York the artist’s enigmatic and corporeal paintings and premiering a series of works using the extraordinary Vantablack nano-technology: a substance – so dark that it absorbs 99.8% of visible light.

Kapoor has gained recent acclaim for his paintings, a long-standing element of his practice that has received new attention over the past decade in museum exhibitions from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shenzhen. At 504 West 24th Street, powerful and explosive large-scale oil paintings churn with expressive brushwork, reverberating between corporal definition and abstraction. Within their seemingly violent energy these paintings contain an intimate and spiritual tension and explore the fundamental functions and poetics of life. One group, titled Ein Sof (2022) refers to the term, in Kabbalah, of the Infinite God – a deity with no static, definable form, one that is hidden and revealed, real and illusory, creator of humankind and humankind's creation. Each vibrant painting reveals the process of bursting out of its own dark shadow with luminous crimson paint, the blood-red material partially defining a figurative object in transformation.

Equally with no tangible beginning or end is Untitled (2023), an evolved iteration of Kapoor’s iconic 1992 work, When I am Pregnant. In that work, a smaller white bump that only reveals itself when seen in profile, re-contextualized the notion of ‘the white gallery wall’ in the language of contemporary art and architecture. While it was art as absence, it was also art impregnated. This work continues the maternal lexicon while developing it further by introducing a black oval void within the pregnant form: an intangible hole that gives no promise for destination, the evolution of the concept of ‘nothing to see’ – just a blinding white apparition, or infinite darkness. Despite being able to see around the installation and cognitively understand the volumetric confines of the form, the internal cavity defies perception, containing more vastness and frightening depth than its container.

Beyond this installation is a dedicated presentation of new gouache drawings. In these works the biological and the architectural converge – in fissures, openings, cracks, windows, passages or conduits which dissolve into impenetrable oblivion. These works on paper are alight with primitive, emotional effusions and yet at their essence bring forth a transcendent radiance, a luminous dawn amongst the bodies.

Next door at Lisson’s 508 West 24th Street space, visitors can experience Kapoor’s sculptures created with Vantablack, a ground-breaking nano-technology material that has extended the artist’s practice into radical new territory, in forms that both appear and disappear before our eyes. Kapoor has been working with Surrey NanoSystems, the company that developed Vantablack, for almost a decade. Like International (Yves) Klein Blue, Vantablack is a method, not a shade of paint or a pigment. It is a microscopic layer of nano rods, so dense that no light that enters can escape. Through these works, Kapoor can transform objects, creating forms which go beyond being. Like the black cube of the Kaaba in Mecca, or Malevich’s Black Square (1915), this is a profound example of the magnetic, mysterious pull of total abstraction and the psychic obliteration that accompanies the transcendence of objects.