Bloomberg’s Farah Nayeri profiles the Anglo artist as he sets up an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects:
Can art regenerate an area? “I haven’t the faintest idea,” he replies. “That’s not something you can set out to do.” His “Cloud Gate” in Chicago “seems to have become a symbol of the city” and “changed the way people think and talk” of it [ . . . . ]
At the Royal Institute, one eye-catching display is the rust-colored entrance to Naples’s Monte Sant’Angelo subway stop, shaped like a sock turned inside out: a big mouth with up and down escalators. I ask if similarities with female body parts are deliberate. “To make new art, you have to make new form,” he replies. “I know that some of the forms are, in a way, very overtly sexual, but that’s what they are. That’s the nature of that kind of pursuit,” he says. [ . . . ]
Kapoor strives to make work on a scale that will stir the viewer the way the wonders of nature do — give “meaning,” he says. He’s clearly in tune with the trend in “experiential” art [ . . . . ]
Ultimately, Kapoor says he resents classification, especially by his Indian origins. “I think we have to resist being pigeonholed,” he says. “I’m not interested in being an Indian artist. I don’t need that as a peg to hang on.”
Anish Kapoor Turns Art Inside Out, Hates the Smell of Hairspray (Bloomberg)
