THE contemporary

After his first bright colour pigment installations
that brought him fame at the beginning of the
1980s, his creations become increasingly audienceimmersing
and monumental. Today, Anish Kapoor
uses state-of-the-art technologies in projects
that mobilise between twenty and eighty people
and sometime need several hundred tons of steel,
or PVC or wax. Indeed, the search for immateriality
at the heart of his work paradoxically requires
vast quantities of materials. Remember that Kapoor
considers his ladders as his primary sculpting
tools and that he gladly accepts invitations to inhabit
grand open spaces (like the Versailles Gardens)
for which he can design works without dimensional
constraints.
His first monumental project dates back to 1999
when the Baltic Center in Gateshead commissioned
Taratantara. Three years later he installed
Marsyas, a 4,000 square metre majestic artery in
PVC membrane, at London’s Tate Modern, probably
the best use ever made by an artist of its immense
Turbine Hall.
However in 2011, at the Paris Monumenta exhibition,
Kapoor designed an even grander project
for the city’s enormous Grand Palais: Leviathan
was a monochrome PVC structure weighing
15 tons and measuring 35 metres high, 72 metres
long and 33 metres wide. Kapoor’s daring gigantism
was a profitable gamble since Leviathan
attracted more than 277,000 visitors, an attendance
record for the Monumenta.
Marsyas and Leviathan were ephemeral colossi, like
those erected at Versailles with its 800 hectares of
gardens. At Versailles Kapoor created a powerful
vortex appearing to descend towards the Earth’s
centre and a 60-metre long work entitled Dirty Corner
weighing several thousand tons and surrounded
by huge blocks of un-worked marble, each weighing
some 3,000 kilos. This orchestrated chaos in
the gardens designed by André Le Nôtre caused
more than a little controversy and one or two acts
of vandalism.
Although the “Versailles effect” does not seem to
have revived his secondary market (down slightly
over the past three years), it is quite clear that his
monumental projects boosted his auction prices in
the past, and substantially contributed to his auction
records. While Kapoor made art news in 2004
with several excellent results, his prices really started
to accelerate in 2006 with a first result above
the million-dollar line 1 . In fact in just 12 months his
price index inflated by 160%, and that was precisely
the year he inaugurated Cloud Gate in Chicago’s
AT&T Plaza, a giant symbolic work made from nearly
100 tons of stainless steel that apparently cost
the city $23 million. At the same epoch, he also installed
his 9-ton Sky Mirror sculpture in New York’s
1) Sotheby’s sold a concave shaped sculpture in alabaster, Untitled
(1999), for $2.256 million, i.e. 5 times its high estimate
(14 November 2006).
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