TODAY YOU WILL BE IN PARADISE
May 4 - June 11, 2016
515 West 24th Street

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent work by Anish Kapoor taking place across both of the gallery’s Chelsea locations. This two-part exhibition demonstrates Kapoor’s ongoing exploration of the formal and conceptual framework that has informed his artistic practice for over three decades, bringing together the highly engineered and more organic processes within his oeuvre. The exhibition will feature a series of reliefs and paintings composed of tumultuous layers of red and white silicone and paint, as well as one monumental earth and resin sculpture on a marble pedestal. At once intimate, imposing, and refined, Kapoor’s work dually confronts and expands conditions of matter, perception, and metaphor.

“Internal Objects in Three Parts” (2013-15) is a three-panel relief in painted silicone and wax and was exhibited this year at the Rijksmuseum in “Anish Kapoor & Rembrandt.” The reliefs appear visceral and daunting, reminiscent of mangled, bloody flesh-like forms. In these heavily layered paintings, Kapoor amplifies the material associations of the red malleable wax he has explored in depth in earlier mechanized installations such as “My Red Homeland” (2003), “Svayambh” (2005), and “Shooting into the Corner” (2009). In these panels the corporeal forms seethe with raw, vertiginous, lurching effect, as shapes come into form as both contingent matter and restless proposition.

In Kapoor’s syncretic practice, organic forms and materials are juxtaposed with polished, geometric sculptures that both expand and compress a viewer’s sense of space. Both minimal and heavily worked surfaces prevail, as opposing forces retain and reflect light with resounding formal and phenomenological effect. Asking that the viewer become as much aware of the sculpture’s shape and volume as his or her own bodily form is a touchstone of Kapoor’s work.

Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Bombay, India, and has lived and worked in London since 1973. Recent major solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at the Château de Versailles, Versailles; the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow; Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Istanbul; Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Le Grand Palais, Paris; National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao; the Tate Modern, London; and Fondazione Prada, Milan. Kapoor received the Premio Duemila in 1990 for his British Pavilion at the 44th Venice Biennale and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1991; he was awarded a CBE in 2003 and a Knighthood in 2013 for dedication to visual arts.

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