Awareness Post: Anish Kapoor

I discovered Anish Kapoor this winter when I visited his exhibit Untrue Unreal in Florence, Italy. It absolutely blew me away. What Kapoor does is not only create beautiful and often disturbing works of art, but he completely warps your perception of space, light, and form through mirrors and intense colors. He has done more traditional sculptures featuring recognizable figures, but the majority of his work is abstract. He draws from his Indian heritage for vivid colors, and his works play with the space they are exhibited in very intentionally. His most famous sculpture, "Cloudgate," also known as the Chicago bean, is a massive bubble like mirror that perfectly reflects everything around it.

Cloudgate, 2006. Stainless steel. Chicago, IL

He has done various similar works with distorting mirrors that make the viewer dizzy and questioning the space and form around them. Other works of his include void-resembling pieces where the viewer struggles to understand whats there and the work changes as they move around it.

Decent into Limbo, 1992. Concrete and Pigment. Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal

While unfortunately photographs do not convey the stupefying nature of Kapoor's works, they can give you a sense of what some of them are like. I would love to go back to another exhibition someday.