Gladstone Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Anish Kapoor, the artist’s first show in New York in four years.  Spanning both gallery spaces, 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.  In these new sculptural works, Kapoor brings together two major facets of his approach to the three-dimensional form, reflecting both the highly engineered and more organic processes within his oeuvre.  At once austere and intimate, messy and refined, Kapoor’s work dually confronts and expands the basic nature of materiality and form.

For the gallery’s 21st Street space, Kapoor has created a site-specific, monumental Cor-Ten steel sculpture that assumes a looming, circular form.  Rising above and extending around the viewer, the work transforms the environment, creating an acute awareness of spatial composition and the phenomenological experience of surface, scale, and shape.  This new sculpture evinces Kapoor’s belief that to generate new art one must create new space, a theme he continually expands upon by playing with our perception of interior and exterior, reflection and depth.  Like his stainless steel sculptures, which use reflective surfaces to destabilize the distinctions between object and surroundings, Kapoor’s works in Cor-Ten steel enfold the viewer into immersive and heightened encounters that capture the intersecting forces of the mind, eye, and body.

Our 24th Street location features a multi-part installation comprised of twenty-two freestanding concrete sculptures.  Formed by densely textured layers of poured concrete and mounted on metal palettes, these heaping sculptures evoke the sensorial nature of materiality and mass.  Intentionally employing materials that could not hold their initial shape, Kapoor let the pieces unravel to create new organic forms that hover between contemporary object and ancient entity. These works linger in a state between coalescence and collapse, a relationship that speaks to Kapoor’s ongoing interest in the idea of “objectness” and the incomplete nature of the sculptural form.

Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Bombay, India, and has lived and worked in London since 1973. Kapoor was recently commissioned, with engineer Cecil Balmond, to design Britain’s largest public artwork, a tower measuring nearly 400 feet that will be unveiled for the London 2012 Olympics.  Inspired by the Tower of Babel, the work, Orbit features a lattice of snaking steel beams that protrude from the structure at gravity-defying angles.  In 2011, Kapoor became the fourth artist to receive the MONUMENTA commission to create a site-specific installation at the Grand Palais in Paris.  Additional past solo exhibitions include shows at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; Museo Guggenheim de Arte Moderno y Contemporáno, Bilbao; Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; CAPC Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela; Hayward Gallery, London; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Fondazione Prada, Milan; DePont Foundation, Tilburg; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz; Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Kapoor received the Premio Duemila for his British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and received the Turner Prize in 1991.