Guggenheim Bilbao shows the spectacular work by Anish Kapor. It is this artist’s first grand-scale monographic exhibition in Spain.

The exhibition, organized together with the Royal Academy of Arts, Lonod, and in close collaboration with the artist, occupies the Museum’s second floor and shows twenty pieces that comprise the last thirty years in the artist’s career.

Kapoor, one of the most important British sculptors of his generation, was born in Bombay in 1954, and moved to London in the 70s where he graduated from Hornsey and Chelsea art schools. His confirmation as an artist would arrive at the beginning of the 90s when he represented United Kingdom at the 44th Venice Biennale and was awarded Duemila Prize for the best young artist and the Turner Prize the following year. He has exhibited all over the world and, more recently, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Guggenheim Berlin, Mak in Viena and at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

His works, monumental in size and characterized by great formal simplicity and frequent use of colour, explore the form and the space and claim the spectator’s implication.

The pieces shown at the retrospective at Bilbao belong to series carried out in the last 30 years. By using materials like colour pigments, stainless steel, wax and cement, Kapoor has been approaching different concepts and ideas often by means of exposing dualities; the colour is removed from the surface and turned into matter, the object is caved in order to fill the space with its dark void, the no-objects become alive by reflecting the spectators on their concave surfaces.

With the works of the last 10 years Kapoor has moved himself further away, replacing his hand with a machine. My red Homeland, 2003, a piece that was exhibited in 2006 at Contemporary Art Centre, Malaga, consists of a container of 12 meters in diameter full of blood-red wax where an engine driven steel jib slowly moves the matter. In Shoothing into the Corner, 2008-09, a cannon shoots into a corner red wax projectiles at 20 minute intervals. The most recent works employ a computer controlled machine that extrudes cement according to a design previously formulated by the artist.

In numerous interviews Kapoor repeatedly states that he has “little to say”; he does not intend to convey a message or particular content, but pursue an idea, initiate a process that will reveal to the spectator what he wants to discover. Kapoor does not want to “defend his work endlessly”; he wants to move away from it and allow it to stand for itself.

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