Anish Kapoor: Awe In a Public Place

As much as I love modern sculpture, I’m afraid my true love ‘s heart is beating for the work of the 1970s, when Richard Serra was young. That said, I’m warming to post-modernist sculpture, owing much to the work of Anish Kapoor, a British artist born in India in 1954. Since art school, he’s created dozens of large scale public works, and who knows how many drawings, models and small scale sculptures. Of course, being an artist of our time, he does not waste sweat on small potatoes. Most of his work for public sites is colossal in scale and even his indoor work is the scale of a Renaissance equestrian, in other words at least as big a horse.  Here’s an example of a work in a private collection (Hole and Vessel, 1984, below, left) that is approximately 6 feet in any direction.

 

But what I’m really getting at is the big public pieces. For instance, Kapoor produced a stainless steel abstract titled “Cloud Gate” (above), lovingly dubbed the Bean by Chicagoans, whose hometown unveiled the piece in 2006 in Millennium Park, a large, paved public area. To happen on the sculpture can only be described as a breathtaking experience because the work is immense, truly huge. It is awesome, in the sense that you want to back away from it and go have a drink to try to forget. But you can’t leave because the thing is beautiful, hauntingly so. Here’s a picture of it (above) taken by Daniel Maidman, published on February 20, 2013 in the Huffington Post.