Anish Kapoor: Dirty Corner

What was particularly memorable for those who saw Anish Kapoor’s first shows, in the early eighties, was the silence conveyed to the exhibition space by those small sculptures covered with yellow, red, black or blue pigments.

When the young Kapoor became established on the international scene at the beginning of the eighties,immediately attracting the attention of critics, the art scene was characterized by very noisy art made of large-format paintings, mainly with harsh and violent colors, and redundant in memories and citations ranging from art history to mythology. In this context, Kapoor’s intimist sculptures were offbeat and also distinguished themselves from the so-called “New British Sculpture” so widely discussed in those years.

On closer inspection, that “new” sculpture was not so very new at all, since it constructed narratives and figurative images made through a system of signs placed in relation to each other to give life to a compositional whole.

The young British sculptors had inherited this conception of sculpture from Anthony Caro, and although it was already the postmodern era Caro, as the expression of a tendency to be overcome, was considered the father to kill. The only one of those artists who created a new way to understand sculpture was Kapoor himself, who felt it was possible to return to the origins of art without suffering inferiority complexes towards the artistic avant-gardes of the twentieth century.

Not that Kapoor distanced himself from the history of modern art - as evidenced by his interest in Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, Robert Smithson or Donald Judd. To put it simply, he believed there were archaic forms tied to the spiritual dimension that never lost their ability to create relationships between individuals.