The exhibition at Florence's Palazzo Strozzi is another installment of Anish Kapoor's 'the best of' in Italy. The exhibition features works, the oldest of which were created in the early 1980s, through realisations from the 1990s and the previous decade, to Void Pavilion VII, which was prepared especially for the Florence show. It is this pavilion, conceived as a space for meditation, that perfectly defines the relationship between the architecture of the Renaissance palazzo and the works of the contemporary artist. Situated in the courtyard of the rigorously symmetrical building that is the palazzo belonging to the wealthy Strozzi family until 1937 (now home to various institutions, cultural associations and a venue for exhibitions of ancient and current art), the pavilion reflects the spirit of early Renaissance Florentine architecture. Its simple, geometric volume, flat walls, built as if of light grey stone, and small gate, invite the visitor to enter and succumb to the mesmerising effect of the rectangular 'holes' inside, drawing the viewer in like black 'cosmic holes'. In the piano nobile rooms, the 'theme' of absolute blackness combined with the artist's subtly suggested optical illusions recurs. Utilising Kapoor's hotly debated Vantablack, the super-black coating Non-Object Black (2015) embodies the exhibition's title.  The four (obviously black) concave spheres of Gathering Clouds (2014), mounted on the walls, on the other hand, seem to devour the surrounding space, appearing both false and unreal, as they appear flat at first glance. Kapoor is thus attempting to prove that Vantablack is not just a colour, but an agent of transformation, a 'pass' to a third, or even fourth dimension?

The artist's trademark as much as the blackest black has also become an intense red, of various shades, associated by critics with Indian spices or simply blood. The Indian trails undoubtedly refer to the biography of the artist, born into a family with Iraqi-Jewish roots in Mumbai (1954) and living in the country until the age of sixteen. The idea for To Reflect an Intimate Part of the Red (1981) was thus said to have arisen from the artist's observation of mounds made of pigments piled up on stalls in front of Hindu temples. Endless Column (1992), on the other hand, pays homage to Brancusi's iconic work, although the material he used to erect it (red pigments) gives the viewer a rather fragile and delicate impression of a structure that does not seem to support the ceiling, but only suggests such an intention.

A completely different feeling is evoked by Svayambhu (2007), a giant parallelogram made of red wax moving from one room to another in an hour, along a twenty-metre ramp. As Gulia Piceni wrote: the cinnabar, buttery chunks crumble and inevitably fall to the ground, and the grey-painted door frames are irreversibly coated with a blood-like substance. Given that the Sanskrit title of the artwork can be translated as 'self-created', the installation seems to be a metaphor for how destruction is a necessary but painful step on the path of art making. For Sue Hubbard, on the other hand, Svayambhu symbolises all migrations and cross-cultures, a fusion of the Indian, Middle Eastern and British Kapoor experience. The British artist emphasises that the abstract railway carriage moving almost imperceptibly along the blood-red tracks, like the pendulum of some great watch, is a physical reminder of the passage of history. The historiosophical reflections that Svayambhu evokes are not the only emotions that the works of the British-Hindu artist provoke. A down-to-earth feeling accompanies viewers placed before Three Days of Mourning, 2016, First Milk (2015) or Tongue Memory (2016), which deal with the physical aspects of human life; the body and its secretions seem to fascinate the artist the most. Instead, a departure from the strictly biological dimension of our existence is provided by a room filled with works in which the artist uses mirrors (Vertigo, 2006, Mirror, 2018 or finally Newborn, 2019).  In contrast to the convex mirrors that appear in such well-known works from art history as Arnolfinich van Eyck's Marriage or Parmigianin's Self-Portrait in a Spherical Mirror, Anish Kapoor prefers concave mirrors that disrupt and distort our sense of reality. Today, they also provoke visitors to the exhibition to take selfies, which are, after all, an essential part of advertising museum exhibitions on social media. 

Anish Kapoor's work is undoubtedly one of the most interesting phenomena of current art. So when will it be possible to see the next impressive exhibition of his work? The opening of a retrospective exhibition of this extraordinary artist at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Denmark will take place soon, on 12 April. Another 'must-see' for all those interested in contemporary art.

Agnieszka Jankowska-Marzec

foto: love IDAA