Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor: The Origin of the World (2004)

The whole exhibition space is the work, with a gigantic void in a slope that rises up from the floor. The void appears endless, broadening into its depth, and seems to encroach upon the observer, controverting conventional concepts of space.

Anish Kapoor, Indian-born British sculptor known for his use of abstract, biomorphic forms and his penchant for rich colours and polished surfaces. He is also the first living artist to have been given a solo show at the Royal Academy of Art in London.

Kapoor was born in India to parents of Punjabi and Iraqi-Jewish heritage. He moved to London to study at the Hornsey College of Art (1973–77) and the Chelsea School of Art (1977–78). A return visit to India in 1979 sparked new perspectives on the land of his birth. These were reflected through his use of saturated pigments and striking architectural forms in bodies of work such as 1000 Names. Created between 1979 and 1980, this series consisted of arrangements of abstract geometric forms coated with loose powdered pigments that spilled beyond the object itself and onto the floor or wall.

During the 1980s and ’90s Kapoor was increasingly recognized for his biomorphic sculptures and installations, made with materials as varied as stone, aluminum, and resin, that appeared to challenge gravity, depth, and perception. In 1990 he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale with his installationVoid Field, a grid of rough sandstone blocks, each with a mysterious black hole penetrating its top surface. The following year he was honoured with the Turner Prize, a prestigious award for contemporary art. Kapoor continued to explore the idea of the void during the remainder of the decade, creating series of works that incorporated constructions that receded into walls, disappeared into floors, or dramatically changed depth with a simple change in perspective.

In the early 21st century Kapoor’s interest in addressing site and architecture led him to create projects that were increasingly ambitious in scale and construction. For his 2002 installation Marsyasat the Tate Modern gallery in London, Kapoor created a trumpetlike form by erecting three massive steel rings joined by a 550-foot (155-metre) span of fleshy red plastic membrane that stretched the length of the museum’s Turbine Hall. In 2004 Kapoor unveiled Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park; the 110-ton elliptical archway of highly polished stainless steel —nicknamed “The Bean”—was his first permanent site-specific installation in the USA. For just over a month in 2006, Kapoor’s Sky Mirror, a concave stainless-steel mirror 35 feet (11 metres) in diameter, was installed in New York. Both Cloud Gate and Sky Mirror reflected and transformed their surroundingd and demonstrated Kapoor's ongoing investigation of material, form and space.

Victor Hugo: Tachism

Victor Hugo incorporated tachism into his work, the making of an image in response to an inital ink blot.

Christian Boltanski

CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI
"La vie possible"

15 May – 06 September 2009

Christian Boltanski, born in France in 1944, is one of the most internationally acclaimed artists of our time. In 2006 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, the Nobel Prize for the Arts presented by the Japanese Imperial Family.
Under the heading "La vie possible", the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein is devoting the largest retrospective exhibition in the German-speaking area since 1991 to Christian Boltanski. It surveys the development of this artist’s oeuvre since the mid-1980s, beginning with a series of the most famous Monuments. The main focus of the exhibition, however, is on his works of the past fifteen years. In a representative cross-section through all the groups of this time-period, plus works produced specially for the exhibition, La vie possible aims to facilitate an experience of the vitality with which the artist explores the possibilities of life itself, "real" life, but also collective life: la vie possible – not only is life basically possible, it is also full of potential for further development.
In the past three decades Boltanski has become an exponent of the "culture of memory" with his spacious installations and the very atmospheric settings of his works. The artist’s images make a complex impact. His intention is not to erect permanent monuments, but to activate memory, i.e., to promote a culture of memory that constantly underscores the living in the face of what has been lost. The Les archives du coeur project in which the artist is in the process of installing an archive of humanity’s heartbeats on the island of Ejima in southern Japan, is also to be seen in this context.
The exhibition illustrates the magnitude with which Boltanski’s work has developed and changed over this period. Works on loan from different museums, but above all from the artist himself, demonstrate how strictly Boltanski has thematically re-oriented his work over about two decades. Very new and as yet unseen works are also on show in the exhibition, which is being produced by the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein and curated by Friedemann Malsch.

Publication
To accompany the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, the interview book La vie possible de Christian Boltanski, which appeared in France in 2008, will be published in a German translation (by Barbara Catoir) by Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne.

www.kunstmuseum.li

Barnaby Hosking

Thoughts (Butterfly) 2010

Tim Noble and Sue Webster

Shadow art created by Tim Noble and Sue Webster