From October 22 to November 28, 2004,GAMeC will host a one-man show by the Anglo-Indian artist Anish Kapoor. A series of gouaches executed by the artist between 1995 and 2000 will be featured.

On the opening day of the show, Thursday, October 21, the city of Bergamo will honor Anish Kapoor at two different events: at GAMeC, and at the Cloister of Santa Marta where a new work commissioned by the Banca Popolare di Bergamo Gruppo BPU Banca will be installed on permanent display.

The gouaches exhibited at GAMeC offer a glimpse of a lesser known and almost “private” aspect of Kapoor’s activity, as he is generally known amongst the general public for his large sculptures, which often assume monumental or environmental dimensions.

Considered one of the most influential artists of his generation, Kapoor’s gouaches, like his sculptures, are focused on subjects of particular interest to him, such as the interpenetration of solid and void, the notion of the infinite, the dimension of the sky, and ambivalences like concave-convex, presence-absence, and tangible-intangible.

Color in Kapoor’s work becomes material and assumes a sculptural dimension: dust blurs the boundaries, eliminating the clear distinction between form and background and rendering the depth of the different planes in the form of space that can be occupied by the observer’s imagination.

Anish Kapoor is one of the most important artists on the international contemporary art scene. Born in Bombay in 1954, he has lived and worked in London since the 1970’s. Since the early 1980’s, his original works, in a continuous dialogue between a two dimensional and three dimensional context, quickly established him as a leading exponent of New British Sculpture, the name given by critics to the new trend in English sculpture, in which participated artists like Cragg, Deacon, Woodrow, and Gormley . His works investigate the dialectic of opposites: man and woman, light and shadow, interior and exterior, and his use of pure color became a constant feature in his works and symbol of the synthesis between East and West. Kapoor’s development as artist has proceeded in two complementary phases. The works from the early 1980’s belong to the first: sculptural objects with forms between the abstract and the natural, completely covered by pure pigment, whose intense color conceals the origin of the object, suggesting transgression . In the 1990’s, he developed instead what could be recognized as his peculiar characteristics : increasingly monumental sculptures that represent his depiction of the void, a void rendered tangible by a cavity that is filled or by material that is emptied.

Kapoor’s works have been exhibited in museums and private galleries worldwide, including the Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1990 he participated in the 44 th Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the “Premio Duemila” (which he also received in 1992). The following year he received the “Turner Prize,” and in 1992 he participated at Documenta IX with the construction Descent into Limbo. That same year, the Seville Expo commissioned the enormous architectural work Building for Void. In 2003 he exhibited at the Naples Archaeological Museum.