June1, 1998

Curiously unsettling, strangely sensual, the sculptor's work of this past decade creates waves in London.

By Naseem Khan

If artists looked like their work, Anish Kapoor would be instantly recognisable. He would be large, serene and calm but with a faintly troubling sense of inhabiting his own private universe. He is, in fact, quite different.

A short, neat man in his 40s, he has an air of restlessness around him. Sitting in the South Bank Centre in London, his attention constantly wavers. He is, he admits, easily bored, adding disarmingly, "especially by myself". But the work Kapoor is exhibiting in his major show in the South Bank's Hayward Gallery is anything but distracted. Rather, it is exceptional in its single-mindedness.

Half Punjabi and half Iraqi-Jewish, Kapoor spent his youth in India and his school days at Doon School, trying to mould himself for a conventional career, but failing. "I grew up thinking I was going to be an engineer. Hated it. Then, I quit," His parents were understanding and agreed to send him to Hornsey College of Art in London instead. Once there, he knew he had found his metier: sculpture. A few weeks after he completed his course, he had his own studio. The rest is history.

Kapoor's reputation grew steadily. His distinctive experiments with form, emptiness and colour may have changed superficially, but the central urge, he asserts, has remained unchanged. And he has met with much success too. In 1990, he was chosen to represent UK in the prestigious Venice Biennial. In 1991, he won the even more prestigious Turner Prize for contemporary British art. His spare and elegant sculptures now sell for up to -- 100,000 (Rs 60 lakh) each; his work is to be found in the very heart of power, in 10 Downing Street.

The show at the Hayward is the most prominent exhibition of his work so far. It is a striking and rather unexpected show. You might go thinking it would be about seeing sculpture. In reality, it is about the interplay between the spaces of the gallery and his sculpture. Go into the first long room -- all shiny pale wood floors and white walls -- and there's hardly anything in it. Just three pieces, no more. Two works that arouse curiosity are set in a wall each. One looks like a plain black rectangle. However, peer at it, and ghostly shapes swim up vaguely from the sheer blackness, and you realise that a cavity goes deep into the wall behind. The other is a circular steel drum, rather like a silver camera lens. As you approach, reflections in it change and shift. Lastly, and most spectacularly, comes a shiny, carved disc on the floor. At its centre lies a deep hole -- how deep you can't see. It seems to be a well whose bottom is invisible, plunging into infinity. But again reflections -- of the white walls, of the black and silver slatted roof, and of the visitors themselves -- ripple like waves of a constantly lapping sea. "I like to think of the room as a space with three holes," says Kapoor cryptically.

He has, in fact, colonised the Hayward's space. His pieces delve deep into the floor like the mesmerising Suck described above. They're suspended in space -- like the 8 m crimson dome hanging across the ceiling of the gallery. Ambiguity is central to Kapoor's works. He uses a number of different materials -- large, sharp-edged and scooped out alabaster slabs, highly polished steel, pigment and granite. But they seem tantalisingly poised between polarities -- between the heavy and the light, opaque and transparent, still and restless, raw physicality and disembodied spirituality. "I have a distrust of objects." he explains, "the 'objectness' of objects."

Consequently, his pieces challenge our sense of natural boundaries. We find ourselves disappearing into spaces and trembling on the edge of something new. Is this a heavy boulder or a bubble of air? A flat slab or a passage into the unknown? Take a step, free your mind and drop your guard.

Not everybody sees his work this way. Opinions so far have been divided. "Magnificent," say many. "Vacuous trickery," say others. Maybe, muses Kapoor, his detractors have been offended by the lack of tangible technical virtuosity. "The forms I use are very simple. They're almost banal." But it is the "reverie" that interests him, he emphasises, "the rest is mechanical".

The transcendental quality of the work -- being and non-being -- has often been noted. It springs, some critics speculate, from Kapoor's Indian roots. He himself does not like too easy a correlation between pigments and Hindu rituals but acknowledges an Indian connection. "India is where my heart is -- the smell of the earth, the sense ..." He pauses to find the word, "The sense that nothing in life is without consequences. Every single detail has its place, and that means life is ... firmed. There is something about it that has immense beauty. The tradition is so vast and so long, so deep and so completely unbroken. It's the only country that I've had the good fortune to be in which has given me an insight into materials."

Indian or British, Kapoor's works have a life of their own. They sit there serenely, reflecting the swift passage of time, and keep their counsel.

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