Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de MÁLAGA

ANISH KAPOOR

My Red Homeland

27 January - 30 April 2006

A monumental installation is the central work that gives the title to the Anish Kapoor exhibition at CAC Málaga, My Red Homeland (2003). It consists of a circle 12 metres in diameter made of wax and red coloured vaseline, a hydraulic engine and a steel arm in constant movement which shapes the material. Together with this work, which is on show in Spain for the first time, there is a selection of sculptures and paintings, many of them also having their first showing.

Regarded as one of the leading figures of international contemporary art, Anish Kapoor is presenting for the first time in Spain, the work My Red Homeland (2003), which gives the title to an exhibition that also includes eight sculptures and six paintings, many of them also having their first showing. The sculptures, whose common feature are the materials used, vaseline and wax, have been brought together for the first time in a single exhibition. Together with My Red Homeland, they refer to the artist's home country, where reddish colours, saffron and black predominate as signs of identity of its culture.

"In Kapoor's work, the colour has the power to transform, it is like a halo that covers enigmatic shapes which disintegrate into infinite times," says Ángela Molina in the exhibition catalogue. Kapoor's hidden side shines through various paintings, some in large format, in this exhibition, which shows his work in a new light and in which he reveals his capacity to transform the universal into something entirely his own.

My Red Homeland (2003), which is the focus of the exhibition and is in continuous movement, is conceived as an endless autonomous process, where the question of creation is closely linked to that of destruction. The work has been shown only twice before: at the Kunsthaus in Bregenz (Austria) in 2003 and at MAC's, Musée des arts contemporains Grand Hornu, (Belgium) in 2004. "What makes My Red Homeland a singular, strange work is its bravery, its lack of adaptation to our capacity for representation. The emotion of the beautiful is followed by the shock of the sublime. A violent shaking of meaning," says Molina.

"Red is a colour I have often worked with because it is the colour of the physical, of the earthly, of the bodily", says Kapoor. This is a very elaborate, personal work, as the title suggests. The work of this artist of Indian origin questions the space, the volume, the light, the shadows and the materials and, most of all, it ponders the meaning of existence through the experience that refers to the spectators' gaze at his work. In that way he creates a place that encourages a constant, open exchange, while challenging the boundaries between art and architecture.