Anish Kapoor

The presentation of Anish Kapoor’s sculptures at the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko will be the first exhibition in Poland introducing one of the masters of contemporary sculpture.

A huge logistic challenge, the exhibition will be presented across two venues. Nine stone sculptures will be shown at the Museum of Contemporary Sculpture, and three works will be displayed at the Orangery Gallery. All the works have been carefully selected by the artist and are testament to his enthusiasm for the presentation of his work in Poland.

The exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Sculpture will be comprised of Kapoor’s enigmatic stone works. An integral language within Kapoor’s diverse practice, these huge, sculpted blocks of granite, marble, limestone, and onyx span the last 25 years of what has thus far been a ground-breaking artistic career. This unique body of work is characterized by abstract, but also biomorphic forms, that emerge from the block of stone as if self-formed, the hand of the sculptor not visible in the sensual physicality of their fluid, oval and meandering surfaces, that undulate into either gestating volume or voided interior. These voids  iterate Kapoor’s abiding pr-occupation with what he has described as the condition of  emptiness, and within these works both mass and non-mass absence and presence are in poetic conjunction.  The works exhibited at the Orangery develop the theme of the void and the self-made object further into even more corporeal territory, but here sculpted with soft and malleable materials – wax, resins and coils of welded steel. In the works Past Present Future (2006) and Gethsemane (2013) Kapoor presents sculptures in his iconic signature red. Colour in these works is as much the substance of their mass as the material that it has saturated. This vibrant, rich and unique hue redolent with both and painterly and cultural  associations as well as the intimacy of our own interiors.

Kapoor’s juxtaposition of the works on display at Oronsko reveals not only the dialectics that are at play between the different sculptural languages of his practice, but also his creative utilization of the  spatial conditions of the spaces of the Centre of Polish Sculpture in Orońsko.

Anish Kapoor was born in Mumbai, 1954 and has lived and worked in London, where he studied art, since 1973. He is considered one of the most influential sculptors of his generation and has become internationally celebrated for his monumental sculptures many of which have become famous landmarks around the world.

He represented the United Kingdom at the 1990 Venice Biennale, where he won the prestigious "Premio 2000" international jury award. He also won the Turner Prize (1991) and the Praemium Imperiale (2011). His work has been exhibited globally since the early 1980s.

His most recent exhibitions include: Gallerie dell’Accademia & Palazzo Manfrin, Venice, Italy (2022); Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK (2021); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany (2020); Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum and Imperial Ancestral Temple, Beijing, China (2019); Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2019); Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal (2018); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico (2016); Château de Versailles, Versailles, France (2015); Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow, Russia (2015); Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Germany (2013); Sakıp Sabancı Müzesi, Istanbul, Turkey (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia (2012).

The exhibition is held under the Honorary Patronage of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. Prof. Piotr Gliński