Anish Kapoor, Blood in the Sky III (2022), via Regen Projects
This month in Los Angeles, artist Anish Kapoor has brought forth a new body of large-scale paintings that continue the artist’s mining of visceral experience, phenomenological experiments and dense, colorful compositions as a site for the visualization of the perceptual experience. Over the last 40 years, Kapoor has engaged a diverse range of media and materials to probe the qualities and contradictions of form and perception. This is the artist’s seventh exhibition with the gallery since 1992 and the first devoted entirely to his painting practice.
Anish Kapoor, Shudder (2022), via Regen Projects
The works in this exhibition demonstrate Kapoor’s deft handling of paint, with abstract forms created in thick, blood-red impasto set against ethereal expanses of vibrant blue and fleshy peach tones. Otherworldly yet brutally corporeal, these ambiguous forms suggest various states of expulsion. Some erupt in plumes of smoke while others luminesce in darkness; still others do not appear to be forms at all so much as the explosive aftermath of furious strokes and visceral smears of paint. Using thickly applied pigment, the artist creates fields of color and streaks of thick paint to exploit close associations with the body and with the natural response to its forms. Yet the works are equally experiments in space and weight, dense applications of the pigment that create heaps and chunks of material on the surface of the work. As much as the artist explores the painting in visual allusion to the body, it is equally a body of its own, dictated by heaps and structures, lumpen material and subtle logics.
Anish Kapoor, Shudder III (2022), via Regen Projects
These paintings animate Kapoor’s longstanding concern with the metaphysical dualities of birth and death, being and nothingness, the transitory and the eternal, the entropic and the sublime—states which convulse together on his canvases, leaving behind the aftermath of what has taken place. Kapoor has encapsulated this sense of temporality in the works—of something that has occurred and may continue to occur—in naming them “painting-acts.” It is within these “painting-acts” that he materializes primordial dramas which seem to precede or altogether eschew rational cognition.
The show closes April 15th.
Anish Kapoor, The Benighted (2022), via Regen Projects
– D. Creahan
Read more:
Regen Projects [Exhibition Site]
