(born in Mumbai in 1954 – lives and works in London)
Pouch, 2006, fibreglass and paint, 244.5 x 174 x 60 cm, (PP)

Provenance:
Lisson Gallery, London
acquired directly from the above by the present owner –
European Private Collection

Exhibited:
Malaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, Anish Kapoor: My Red Homeland, 27 January - 30 April 2006, exh. cat. p. 63, ill.;
Vienna, Belvedere, Love Story, 15 June - 5 October 2014, exh. cat. p. 155, ill.

Literature:
David Anfam (ed.), Anish Kapoor, London 2009, p. 359, ill.

“I have made works that are holes in the floor, that are directly, if you like, the falling – but that falling doesn´t have to be downwards. The falling in some curious way also be towards a horizon or even upwards. Vertigo is at the centre of this though – disorientation.”
(“A Conversation. Anish Kapoor with Donna de Salvo, in: Anish Kapoor. Marsyas, London: Tate Publishing, 2002, p. 62)

Anish Kapoor, who ranks amongst the most influential artists of his generation, explores the phenomenology of space and the concept of the void in his overpowering sculptures and installations. His works, which he creates out of intensely tactile or reflective materials such as coloured pigment, wax, mirrors, polished steel or fibreglass, demonstrate multiple metaphysical contrarieties which are driven to extremes. Kapoor connects interpenetrating concave and convex forms, interior and exterior, solid and immaterial. In numerous works he employs highly polished surfaces which, as metaphors of perception, capture and absorb their surrounding space in order to reflect it back in amplified fashion. For the viewer he engenders an unmistakable displacement of the coordinates in space, a shift which is often accompanied by a sensation of falling, of being drawn inward, of losing oneself.

The sculpture Pouch embodies a transformation, characteristic for the artist, between closed volumes and hollow bodies. That which from the side looks like an everted pouch, from the front is a duct leading into the depth, a portal to another world which, due to its size, completely captures the viewer and lets him/her plunge into an immaterial, mystical space. The border between sculpture and painting dissolves in the interplay of space and intense red chromaticity. When asked why he repeatedly worked for many years with the colour red, Kapoor answered, “I think that it has to do with the fact that it is biological. That we read ourselves in the colour red. (...) In contrast to black, red additionally has a quality of interiority.”
(Anish Kapoor in: “Ich will nur spielen”, Interview with Heike Fuhlbrügge, Art Magazine, 2013)