Untitled

Internationally recognized as one of the most influential sculptors of his generation, Bombay-born artist Anish Kapoor is known for his lyrical sculptures that bear the sensibilities of Eastern and Western cultures and artistic traditions. The present lot is from a series of unique sculptures handcrafted from gourds that were made by Kapoor as part of a social art project in Japan between 1993 and 1995, organized by and finally exhibited at Nishimura Gallery, Tokyo. Over the two years, Kapoor worked with gourd-growing farms in Kusunoki-cho for this project. Using select imported seeds, the artist manipulated and warped the natural shapes of the young gourds, growing them into enigmatic, biomorphic forms with sensual curves, and finally coloring and incising them with minimal shapes and slits. In this imaginative and skilled transformation, the gourds appear to turn themselves inside out, womb-like, as if to negate the idea of an outer surface. Typical of his works in the late 1980s and 1990s, this series of self-generating works invites viewers to focus on balance; its voids becoming sites of meditation on the metaphysical polarities of matter and non-matter, inner and outer, concealment and revelation.