Anish Kapoor: Archaeology: Biology

Anish Kapoor states that when the process leads the artist, the work is a discovery. His artistic practice involves a phenomenological approach based on the experience of the creative act, as the artist himself suggests: “I don’t have anything to say, but I know that if I immerse myself into the process, it brings me to meanings I could never have imagined.” For Catherine Lampert, curator of Anish Kapoor. Archaeology: Biology, this is a guiding principle of the exhibition in which the work acquires a dimension of its own that involves the viewer, inviting them to experience both the plenitude and freedom of form, and the potential space created by the object. As Kapoor states: “So many of the works […] come to the idea that the space itself is only notionally defined, there is something beyond it. It is a proposition about space treated as a poetic idea.” This spatial experience of the work generates a sensation of “unbridgeability,” as Horst Bredekamp puts it, that “induces people, faced with unboundedness, to find guiding principles in themselves.”

Although the exhibition is not chronological, it offers a wide-ranging perspective on Kapoor’s work—with sculptures dating from 1980 to 2016—experience of material and form are articulated around four thematic kernels.

The first section titled, Auto-Generated Forms, includes work made in the medium that established Kapoor’s reputation towards the end of the 1970s: pigment. The colored powder was significant because it lacked concrete materiality. Often mysterious objects with uncertain boundaries, other works turn upon the interaction of form with light: perfect prisms and mirrors that extend and distort space. The second section, Many Kinds of Beauty, proposes a strangely harmonious post-industrial world, bringing into tension the ideals of purity and the mathematical precision of form—the swelling of When I am Pregnant (1992) and the seamless mirror surface of C-Curve (2007)—with the grotesque and the scatological cement extrusions of Ga Gu Ma (2011–12). In the third room, Time, we are enveloped by the monochrome red dome At the Edge of the World (1998), a work that frames abduction as a means of representing the infinite. And finally, in Unpredictable Forces we confront works of primal origin, cavernous forms in earth and colour; My Red Homeland (2003) a churning disc of wax in a perpetual motion and state of becoming; silicone paintings of a visceral and cannibalistic materiality, and a vast biological fissure in the gallery wall, Archaeology and Biology (2007).

The exhibition was produced by the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), with the support of our Board of Trustees, Patronato Fondo de Arte Contemporáneo, A.C. As a University museum, the MUAC is an institution of artistic, academic and social synergy, within the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).