Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor is a Turner Prize winning sculptor. Born in Mumbai, he attended the Doon School and moved to Israel in 1970. He lives in London. Jonathan Glancey of the Guardian meets the artist in his studio:

Anish Kapoor with his work Sky Mirror at the Rockefeller Centre in New York. Photo: Lisa Carpenter

Kapoor conducts a vigorous tour of his studio. The first thing he shows me is an enormous, deep resin tube, on which one of his masked accomplices is working amid the noise and dust of the workshop. It looks like an enormous semi-erect penis, I cannot help observing. “But it isn’t!” Kapoor laughs . “It’s the opposite. I’m interested in the opposite, and in the not-opposite. It’s both. It will have a very, very dark interior. The idea is that a person will be able to walk in … I have always been interested in antiphallic form - the opposite of which, of course, is deeply phallic. Hahahaha! It’s not onwards and upwards …”

It is inwards and downwards: Kapoor is a psychic tunneller and excavator. Seeing his sculptures en masse in the studio, it makes one almost queasy sensing how many of them are concerned with feminine holes, clefts, entrances, slashes - often sculptures in a deep, primal red that screams of female human flesh, menstrual blood, the blood of childbirth. But Kapoor has never been interested in anything other than abstraction. The exploration of the feminine bypasses a lurid fascination with the specifics of the female form; it is more, perhaps, to do with an investigation of the dark places of the imagination. Not for him the world of art as commodity; not for him irony.

Renderings of that Tribeca apartment tower with an Anish Kapoor sculpture in the lobby. Designed like off-kilter Jenga blocks.

Everyone is talking about the Herzog & de Meuron’s 56 Leonard reveal, the apartment complex that looks like it was designed by a Gehry-influenced Dr. Seuss. The building will be a 57-story residential complex in Tribeca, housing 145 residences, each with its own unique floor plan and private outdoor space. The architects describe the units as “houses stacked in the sky,” but they aren’t for those scared of heights.

Come Fall 2010, residents will start calling the $650 million luxury building home, and Curbed reports that residences, all 2 to 5-bedrooms, will range from $3.5 million to $33 million.

Even with floor-to-ceiling fireplace hearths, a library, a 75-foot swimming pool, a screening room, a yoga studio and a “Tribeca Tot Room” for the kiddies…would you live in such a vertigo-inducing building?

Our urban landscape can be a bit dreary. All one needs to do to liven things up is drop a giant, shiny, elephant-sized bean smack dab in the center of the city.

Enter Amish Kapoor, the Indian-born sculptor who brought life to that idea in Chicago with his 2004 work Cloud Gate—the sculpture that became an integral part of the Windy City. Its reflective 110-ton mass is a sparkling example of Kapoor’s unique talent in creating artwork that engages viewers, interacts with them and creates the feeling that they are physically enveloped.

Made from the same polished stainless steel, and possessing the same reflexive quality as Cloud Gate, is 2006’s S-Curve, currently on display at the ICA. The work creates a screen of sorts, displaying interesting abstractions of viewers as they walk by. This use of skewed perception and monumental scale threads through many of the artist’s works. Perched boldly in the center of the gallery, this piece demonstrates one of the most profound elements of his work—screwing with the viewer’s head.

Born and raised in Mumbai (then known as Bombay), Kapoor moved to London to study art at the age of 19. Coming to prominence in the early ’80s, alongside a group of emerging English artists such as Richard Deacon and Anthony Gormley, Kapoor became known for pushing sculpture in new directions, challenging its borders and materials.

The use of endless depth, inspired by human body cavities, also frequently appears in Kapoor’s work. My Body, Your Body, from 1993, presents a deep blue rectangular canvas, but on a closer look, a seemingly infinite void is revealed. His mastery of his ideas is achieved, surprisingly, without heavy reliance on computers nor mathematics, but rather through drawings, his team of capable assistants and the element of chance. He consistently keeps his audience poking their heads further inside the artwork, much to the dismay of museum security.

One of the highlights of Kapoor’s work remains the reaction it provokes. Chief ICA curator Nicholas Baume has provided a very thoughtful sampling of the artist’s career, highlighting the rich interconnection between the artworks. Baume had his hands full coordinating the show’s 14 pieces. “We had to install a special barn door and use a crane to bring in one sculpture,” he says. Fortunately, Kapoor’s artwork was large enough to cover the hole.

This Full Moon sideboard is designed by Sotirios Papadopoulos, and is a limited edition of 24 pieces, produced by Italian design company Ennezero. A piece of furniture that adds a celestial touch to any décor with a photo-realistic image of the moon’s surface lavishly printed on one of its sides. The Full Moon Sideboard was created using a very special luminous and ecological paint called ELI ( comes from a special ecological powder which is modified into a gelcoat-PVC and covers the furniture. ), the furniture creates special effects in the dark and make you feel like you are basking in unadulterated moonlight on a full-moon night in the country. Fullmoon sideboard will be on display at the SOHO gallery in Milan for the “dEMOsign” exhibition. - Via - Inventorspot & Yatzer

According to the less alarming forecasts of the GIEC (Intergovernmental group on the evolution of the climate), the ocean level should rise from 20 to 90 cm during the 21st Century with a status quo by 50 cm (versus 10 cm in the 20th Century). As a solution to this alarming problem architect Vincent Callebaut came up with this ecotectural marvel that could serve as a luxurious future retreat for 50,000 inhabitants seeking refuge from rising waters due to global warming. He believes the world will be desperately seeking shelter from the devastations of climate change, and hopes the auto-sufficient amphibious city will serve as a luxurious solution. To bad that right now we are close to 7 billion people and this luxurious future retreat is just for 50,000 inhabitants

Vincent Callebaut called this project “Lilypad“, but this ecotectural marvel is also called as “Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees”. The whole structure is covered in green walls and roofs, the top portion covered in grasses with the inner portion featuring a palm oasis, and the under portion serving as a bed for natural sea planktons and oceanic plants. Finally if you were already planning to reserve a place to this luxurious future retreat stay calm, because Vincent Callebaut hopes that “Floating Ecopolis for Climate Refugees” will make the transition from design to reality around the year 2100.