We interview Anish Kapoor in his south London studio ahead of a major two-venue retrospective during the 59th Venice Biennale, where the artist will finally introduce the world to his Vantablack sc...
, will become the first British artist to be honoured with a show. The second will unfold across the canal at the 18th-century Palazzo Manfrin, which, following many years of vacancy, has been acquired by the Anish Kapoor Foundation to become its headquarters once restorations are complete. There is poetic symmetry in these shows. In the 18th century, Count Manfrin, a wealthy, Croatian-born tobacco merchant, transformed the first floor of Palazzo Manfrin into a public picture gallery.
Another room is erupting with what appears to be the inverted embodiment of Shakespeare’s ‘mountain of mad flesh’, another enormousKapoor’s paintings, revealed for the first time at Modern Art Oxford last year, harbour a similar depth of gore and violence.
It’s difficult to avoid the feminine motifs that weave in and out of Kapoor’s work so freely. Sometimes they’re subtle, sometimes they’re blatant. Either way, Freud would have his work cut out in these studios. ‘Who is she? What is she? Is she my mother? I think that’s of course an ongoing, deeper, pursuit, again to which I don’t know the answer. Who cares!’ Kapoor exclaims, standing in front of a work that resembles a giant black vulva draped in a testicular formation.
The room is a grid of glass cases filled with black forms on white backgrounds . Granted, these forms are very black, and, even on close frontal inspection, very flat. But look again, and move to the side of the glass boxes and something magical does indeed occur. What had two dimensions now has three as shapes protruding seemingly from nowhere.
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