Nasher Sculpture Center

A member of the younger generation of British artists who have sought to poeticize the Minimalist object and reverse its self-referentiality with personal, even metaphysical meanings, Anish Kapoor first came to international attention in 1981-82 in a series of exhibitions on new trends in British sculpture. Since then his work has progressed from ensembles of small-scale, brightly colored shapes experienced as a field to singular, large-sized, iconic objects. They retain and intense coloration, achieved not by painting but by rubbing pigment into a gessoed wooden form, which gives them a special, mysterious aura of light and helps transform materiality into something more visionary. Kapoor's forms are varied but distinct, ranging from the organic and erotic to the more architectural and mathematical. Attempts have been made to link them with Hindu symbolism; but despite the artist's strong interest in Indian culture and religion and their correspondence in color with Indian dyes and natural pigments, they seem rather to come from an intuitive or automatist grasp of signs and forms with a lease on universal subconsciousness.

A series of works in conical shapes with serrated sides (dating from 1984-85) are ostensibly linked by title to a mountain symbolism, but they also seem sexually charged. In Search of the Mountain I is the earliest. Its basically male, elongated, hollow shape, colored an intense blue and serrated inside as well as out, bites aggressively into the contained and surrounding space. Mother as a Mountain (1985; Kapoor, Kunsthalle Basel, 1985, n.p.) is red and assumes a more peaklike pyramidal form, albeit with female organic overtones. In Search of the Mountain II (Kapoor, Kunsthalle Basel, 1985, n.p.) is blue and attached to the wall. Its internal surfaces are smooth and its cone shape is truncated, leaving a dark elliptical void that reverses the maleness of the first In Search of the Mountain. Among the wall drawings included by Kapoor in his installations (Kapoor, Kunsthalle Basel, 1985, n.p.) are some that explore similar forms in a loose pictographic style, showing the intuitive, spontaneous origins of his sculptural ideas.