ANISH KAPOOR-ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS-

Anish Kapoor.

Red wax, vaseline, paint on the door-frames, on its tracks, on the white wall. A massive beet-red sculpture flows from one gallery to another, impercetibly moving like a railway carriage along matching red tracks. It's creating on its own. a scupture that finds its own shape as soon as passes through the two doorways which give a precise form and seemingly force the block through their restrictive frame making it leave behind traces of this weird material. it looks like blood, doesn't it? its slowness is creepy since you don' t know till the end if this massive railway carriage will definitely pass through the door-frame without any breaks. "Svayambh" comes from a sanskrit word "self-generated". the sculpture uses the classical architecture of the doors to shape its form, squeezing itself through them almost imperceptibly. It is like a geological process of attrition and formation; the work's movement leaves behind a viscous red residue, coming from the flanks and the top of the sculpture that is finding its own shape.

Anish Kapoor. Red wax, vaseline, paint on the door-frames, on its tracks, on the white wall. A massive beet-red sculpture flows from one gallery to another, impercetibly moving like a railway carriage along matching red tracks. It's creating on its own. a scupture that finds its own shape as soon as passes through the two doorways which give a precise form and seemingly force the block through their restrictive frame making it leave behind traces of this weird material. it looks like blood, doesn't it? its slowness is creepy since you don' t know till the end if this massive railway carriage will definitely pass through the door-frame without any breaks. "Svayambh" comes from a sanskrit word "self-generated". the sculpture uses the classical architecture of the doors to shape its form, squeezing itself through them almost imperceptibly. It is like a geological process of attrition and formation; the work's movement leaves behind a viscous red residue, coming from the flanks and the top of the sculpture that is finding its own shape.

I have found this sculpture very dramatic. The huge mass of this thirty-ton monochrome has its body flayed by the building. It is too big to enter the door but it is meant to go into it. This is nothing but a metaphor of the every-day effort of the human being to go beyond doors and beyond limits. it is an endless tragedy since we have a determined shape, physiology and nature. it is our doorway. if we want to be too big, we will loose part of ourselves whilst passing thorough it.

we cannot decide to avoid breathing. that is one of the shapes of our door.