hyde or die

Here we go again, with my neediest feature on my little ‘ole blog, “Book I Want, Do Not Have, Can Not Afford”.  This weeks installment is the gorgeous tome from Phaidon, a monograph on the inimitable Anish Kapoor.  Even if Kapoor wasn’t an all-time fave, the gorgeous ombre cover is a work of art in itself.  If you break it down, $95 for 528 pages isn’t too bad, but when I break it down, I also like paying my electricity bill so the food in my refrigerator doesn’t go bad.  However, reading the description isn’t helping with my trigger happy buying finger:

Anish Kapoor’s sculptures are as mysterious as they are beautiful. Although they employ a wide range of traditional and non-traditional materials, from alabaster to polished steel to vaseline, their real subject is often immaterial and ungraspable: a chasm, a reflection, a column of air. Kapoor belongs to a generation of British sculptors (Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley) who revived sculpture by injecting it with new vitality, even playfulness, in the wake of Minimalism. It should come as no surprise, then, that he is one of the best-loved artists working today, the recipient of numerous international awards (including the Turner Prize) and the creative force behind some of the most popular public sculptures in contemporary art, including Marsyas in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall (2002) and Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park (2004). This generously illustrated volume includes hundreds of artworks spanning Kapoor’s long and celebrated career, as well as perceptive new essays by David Anfam and Johanna Burton and an insightful interview by Donna De Salvo.

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June 29, 2010, 10:00am  

Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor have been commissioned by the Israel Museum to create two new monumental installations on the Museum’s campus, as it nears completion of a comprehensive renewal and expansion, together with a complete reinstallation of all of its collection galleries. These site-specific works will be installed as focal points within the Museum’s newly re-organized campus, opening to the public on July 26, 2010.

These commissions include:

Olafur Eliasson’s installation “Whenever the Rainbow Appears”, consisting of 300 individual paintings that represent in paint on canvas the progression of colors in the spectrum of light visible to the human eye. Measuring a total of 15 x 2.4 meters (or nearly 50 x 8 feet), the work reads from afar as an extended continuum of color. It will be installed at the end of the Museum’s newly designed “Route of Passage”, an enclosed walkway bridging the Museum entrance with a newly centralized Gallery Entrance Pavilion at the heart of the campus.

Anish Kapoor’s site-specific sculpture of polished stainless steel that takes the shape of a 5-meter-tall (15-foot) hourglass. Anchoring the Museum’s outdoor Crown Plaza, at the highest point on its 20-acre campus, this monumental work responds to the duality of Jerusalem, inverting reflections on its curved and mirrored surface of Jerusalem’s sky and of the Museum’s built landscape.

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March 09, 2010, 11:00am  

Installation shot at the Saatchi Gallery of the new exhibition The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today

And here is the weekend/near future guide for cities other than Los Angeles.  This week it includes:

New York

• The Gagosian located at Madison Avenue is opening Damien Hirst’s new show End of an Era.  I don’t know if it will be good, but it will probably be flashy. So that’s something, right?
• You only have about one more week to go take in some pretty epic Keith Sonnier’s at Mary Boone Gallery.  It comes down on February 6.
• A little more than half way through it’s show is Anish Kapoor: Memory at the Guggenheim. Something to do to keep you out of the cold, right?*

London

• The Saatchi is opening it’s newest exhibition (pictured above) entitled The Empire Strikes Back: Indian Art Today, looks to be a promising show.
• Ed Keinholz at The National Gallery is certainly a must see!  If you haven’t had a chance to go by yet, hurry up because it’s only on through February 21st.
• The Unilever Series by Miroslaw Balka is halfway through its run at the Tate Modern.

Paris

• Palais Tokyo is closing Bertrand Dezoteux this Sunday. Last chance!
• Herman Diephuis: Ciao Bella is at the Centre Pompidou this weekend. Buy tickets here.
• L’interprétation des rêvesat is opening at the Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian this weekend. Looks surreal.

*You’re right, I don’t know how cold it is there. It’s sunny and warm. Sorry for trying to pretend like I understand.

January 29, 2010, 2:55pm  

Anish Kapoor, Svayambh, 2007

November 11, 2009, 1:15pm  

Anish Kapoor Shooting into the Corner 2008/09

October 29, 2009, 5:15pm  

Anish Kapoor  Untitled 2007

October 05, 2009, 3:09pm  

Anish Kapoor

via piercejackson

September 22, 2009, 2:34pm  

Anish Kapoor Shooting into the Corner, 2008/2009

I am loving this departure from the “jelly bean” look that I am so used to.

March 17, 2009, 12:35pm  

Anish Kapoor Memory 2008

This work was commissioned for the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin.  I am absolutely enamored with it.  It looks like what you would get if you turned one of his more reflective “beans” inside out. 

The website says “Memorythus remains situational. It is relativistic, phenomenological, and ultimately unclaimed. As we attempt to catch glimpses of the sculpture’s exterior shell and interior belly, the present quickly becomes the past.”  Which I think translates into “I can’t wrap my head around it and I am a little high so I will project my aging and receding hairline on to this piece while I munch on something covered in mayonnaise.”  Just saying.*

*Don’t even get me started on the magazine I received in the mail today from Deutsche Guggenheim, they were asking a prominent art collecting couple what they would rather have a sorcerer grant them.  Not kidding. I was embarrassed for them. 

January 02, 2009, 4:34pm