Anish Kapoor at Barbara Gladstone - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Like a dream of falling, Anish Kapoor's new sculptures pull you out of gravity in like manner easily it almost makes you laugh. The greatest in quantity dramatic of these works are sum of two units deformed globes made of lustrous stainless carbonized iron A yawning concave depression in the 6-foot-tall Turning the World Upside Down #4 shows an inverted reflection of the viewer upon its ripply surface. In Turning the World Inside without the tunneled beginning of what direct the eyes like a cosmic wormhole extremitys in dim opacity, but viewers are throw backed twice along the way -- one time on its rim and again upon the sculpture's outer face.

Similar optical issues are created by two untitled works that were plant into the gallery's walls. The first, a of great depth bowlshaped form scooped into the wall at organ of sight level and lined with ceramic overlayed in platinum, creates another upside-down reflection. The next to the first set too far overhead for viewers to be caught upon its reflective surface, is lined with tin and shaped like a trumpet's flared bell. This work shows a visual resonance that put in mind ofs an almost comically literal music of the spheres.

While these metallic plastic arts are as buoyant as Warhol's floating Mylar pillows, Kapoor provides ballast in the form of sum of two units somber, gray-blue limestone plinths. individual face of each of these rough-hewn closes of stone harbors a polished depression which creates inverted images. A nimbus of darkness encircles the reflection created by the loaf-shaped concavity in Almost Human. The simplest of the statuarys shown, Mirror. contains a big, shallow, exquisitely circular dish of polished stone, a kind of salver for the reflection it tenders up.

Early upon Kapoor, an Indian-born English artist, warped perceptions of weight and mass with immaculate powdered pigment. Applied to the surfaces of his biomorphic plastic arts and sometimes heaped on the floor beneath them, the pigment played tricks with light, softening it or sucking it away entirely. Like James Turrell Kapoor has also been interested in making optical theater by means of manipulating ambient illumination. The mirrored-surface plastic arts which Kapoor began making in 1995 aren't, then, the radical departure from his previous work that they might at first strike one as being They set out to engage art history's drawn out lineage of real and depicted mirrors, which have furnished a place for the bystander all the way from van Eyck and Velazquez to MichelangeIo Pistoletto and Dan Graham. Kapoor, however, remains at least as interested in the quality of the light that's absorbed by the agency of his sculptures as in the reflections they cast back.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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