The Mystical Abstraction in the Work of Anish Kapoor  29 September 2012 until 16 January 2013

JHM Art Gallery

The JHM will exhibit three pieces by Anish Kapoor from end September 2012 until mid-January 2013 in the Art Gallery. The work originates from a private collection, De Nederlandsche Bank Collection and the Vervoordt Foundation.

Artist Anish Kapoor's roots can be found in India, where he was born in 1954. His father was Indian Hindu. His mother came from an Iraqi Jewish family that moved from Baghdad to Poona around 1920. Kapoor was raised in a modern, non-religious and cosmopolitan family. During a stay in Israel between 1970 and 1973, where he worked on a kibbutz and studied electrical engineering, he decided to become an artist. He moved to London and attended two art academies there.

The organic shapes and brightly coloured pigments seen in his early work are inspired by his native country. His abstract constructions are attempts to summon the mystical. Later sculptures and drawings are characterised by hollow spaces and holes - the contrast between inside and outside - alluding to dualities such as man and woman, heaven and earth, light and dark, the physical and spiritual. The curved forms of his huge metal objects and installations reflect the viewer and the surroundings and pull them inside. Kapoor's most recent and much-discussed work is the 115 metre high metal Orbit 'tower' next to the Stratford Olympic Stadium in London. Anish Kapoor has received many distinctions, among which the British Turner Prize (1991) and the Japanese Praemium Imperiale (2011).