Museum And Gallery

A certain kind of disorientation

Anish Kapoor at the ICA, MCC Award Winners at Boston Sculptors, And ‘8 in ’08’ at Massart

By RANDI HOPKINS | May 20, 2008

Anish Kapoor, S-Curve (2006)

“Anish Kapoor” at Institute of Contemporary Art, 100 Northern Ave, Boston | May 30–September 1 | 617.478.3181

“En Mass: Award-Winning Massachusetts Sculptors” at Boston Sculptors Gallery, 486 Harrison Ave, Boston | Through June 22; opening reception June 6 @ 6-9 pm | 617.482.7781

“8 in ’08” at Mass College of Art, Patricia Doran Graduate Gallery, 600 Huntington Ave, Boston | June 5–22 | 617.879.7000

Brilliantly colored loose pigment powder, such as that sold for ritual use at the entrances to temples in India, contributed to the surprising appearance of Bombay-born, London-based sculptor Anish Kapoor’s earliest works in the late 1970s and early ’80s — work that seemed to add a spiritual and poetic element to Minimal forms. His career-launching early pigment work, 1000 Names (1979-’80), will be on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, along with 12 other sculptures created between 1979 and 2006, in “ANISH KAPOOR: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE,” which opens on May 30. During the ’80s, intense color began to disappear from Kapoor’s work, as the artist began to investigate voids, absence, and inner space in a way that seems to turn our thinking about sculpture inside out. In the late ’90s, he began to investigate the sensual and symbolic effects of mirrored surfaces; that led most famously to his massive, reflective Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millennium Park, a work known affectionately as “The Bean.” Kapoor, who represented Great Britain at the Venice Bienniale in 1990 and was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize in 1991, has described his interest in “a certain kind of disorientation that I hope reorients, trying to hold things to a certain stillness . . . so that somehow one is forced to slow down enough, to look, to measure with perhaps a little uncertainty in the eye, so that you have to put your hand out to affirm that what you are looking at is really there.”

Home-grown new sculpture is alive and well right here right now, too, as Boston Sculptors Gallery regularly reminds us. The cooperative gallery, which serves as a showcase for its member sculptors, is currently giving its space over to the group exhibition “EN MASS: AWARD-WINNING MASSACHUSETTS SCULPTORS,” which it’s presenting jointly with the Massachusetts Cultural Council. The contributions by the five winners of 2007 MCC Artist Fellowships in Sculpture/Installation — Alan Colby, Peggy Diggs, Matthew Hincman, Ariel Kotker, and Nick Rodrigues — include very contemporary life-sized heads carved from limestone, installations involving light, shadow, and hand-crafted common objects, and work incorporating video. Jurors for the awards included Laura Donaldson, Paul Ha, Linda Norden, and Susan Spencer Crowe.

The inaugural class of Massachusetts College of Art’s low-residency MFA program — a/k/a Mass Art at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown — exhibits new work in “8 IN ’08,” which, curated by artist Helen Miranda Wilson, opens June 5 in MassArt’s Patricia Doran Graduate Gallery. The opening also marks the 40th anniversary of the FAWC, which has been providing fertile soil for artistic activity since its founding in 1968 by Provincetown-loving artists and writers, among them Myron Stout and Stanley Kunitz.

On the Web
Institute of Contemporary Art: www.icaboston.org
Boston Sculptors Gallery: www.bostonsculptors.com
Mass College of Art: //mysite.verizon.net/resvrce3/8in08copy/

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Topics: Museum And Gallery , Anish Kapoor , Institute of Contemporary Art , Sculpture , More

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