Anish Kapoor Today You Will Be In Paradise at Barbara Gladstone

Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent work by Anish Kapoor taking place across both of the gallery’s Chelsea locations. This two-part exhibition demonstrates Kapoor’s ongoing exploration of the formal and conceptual framework that has informed his artistic practice for over three decades, bringing together the highly engineered and more organic processes within his oeuvre. The exhibition will feature a series of reliefs and sculptures composed of tumultuous layers of red and white silicone and paint, as well as concave voids in polished stainless steel and matte fiberglass. At once austere and intimate, messy and refined, Kapoor’s work dually confronts and expands conditions of matter, perception, and metaphor.

“Internal Objects in Three Parts” (2013-15) is a three-panel relief in painted silicone and wax and was exhibited this year at the Rijksmuseum in “Anish Kapoor & Rembrandt.” The reliefs appear visceral and daunting, reminiscent of mangled, bloody flesh-like forms. In these heavily layered paintings, Kapoor amplifies the material associations of the red malleable wax he has explored in depth in earlier mechanized installations such as “My Red Homeland” (2003), “Svayambh” (2005), and “Shooting into the Corner” (2009). In these panels the corporeal forms seethe with raw, vertiginous, lurching effect, as shapes come into form as both contingent matter and restless proposition.

In Kapoor’s syncretic practice, organic forms and materials are juxtaposed with polished, geometric sculptures that both expand and compress a viewer’s sense of space. This exhibition will feature one monumental earth and resin sculpture on a marble pedestal, as well as the reflective and polished voids for which Kapoor is well known. Both minimal and heavily worked surfaces prevail, as opposing forces retain and reflect light with resounding formal and phenomenological effect. Asking that the viewer become as much aware of the sculpture’s shape and volume as his or her own bodily form is a touchstone of Kapoor’s work.