Anish Kapoor: Turning the World Upside Down

Kensington Gardens, London, until 13 March 2011.

Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor is famous for his architectural sculptures and vivid use of colour. His works are also feats of engineering — his speciality at university before he left to pursue his art. From ArcelorMittal Orbit, a tower of twisted steel chosen as the centrepiece for London's 2012 Olympic park, to Svayambh, a gliding slab of blood-red wax, the significance of Kapoor's installations lies in how they are built.

Kapoor, who is exhibiting in London, New Delhi and Mumbai, regards his sculptures as embodiments of “mythologies” that include the process of their creation. “Meaning is gradually constructed, just as the object is constructed,” he explains. The shows in India highlight his dynamic artworks — shown in the past year at London's Royal Academy and at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain — which use machinery to evoke a sense of change. His current London exhibition, in Kensington Gardens, features four highly polished stainless-steel forms that distort reflections of their surroundings like fairground mirrors.

Sky Mirror (2006) in London's Kensington Gardens is one of four Anish Kapoor works manufactured by the process that is used to grind scientific optics. Credit: ANNTHEA LEWIS

The genesis of that series lies in Kapoor's collaboration with Cecil Balmond, head of the Advanced Geometry Unit at engineering firm Arup. Kapoor first worked with Balmond a decade ago to produce a sculpture for the cavernous turbine hall at London's Tate Modern. He helped Kapoor to refine his aesthetic ideas, bringing expertise in construction techniques, the tensile strengths of materials and the limits of manufacturing. The product was Marsyas (2002) — two massive steel rings joined by a red PVC membrane stretched 140 metres between them, supporting a third steel toroid above visitors' heads. Balmond reprogrammed Arup's in-house software to model the membrane's precise form.

A discarded design later appeared in Chicago as Cloud Gate (2004): a 10-metre-high, jelly-bean-like arch of polished steel. The forms in Kensington Gardens are similar in style. Cut from segments of a sphere, they were produced by the same process that is used for grinding large scientific optics. One, C-Curve (2007), reminds me of a smaller mirror in my office: a relic of a prototype three-dimensional television. That too is beautifully made, but its bending of light is directed by a practical purpose. By contrast, Kapoor's curved mirrors are engineered to reflect the viewer's inner world.

Anish Kapoor

National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, until 27 February 2011; and at Mehboob Studios, Mumbai, until 16 January 2011.

In Kapoor's recent foray into dynamic works, now on show in India, exquisite engineering underlies other mythologies. In Svayambh (2007), an enormous block of red wax creeps along a hydraulic track, apparently being shaped as it passes through several gallery doorways. The name derives from a Sanskrit word, referring to that which is created of its own accord, rather than by a human hand. In fact, little wax is scraped off the installation after its first pass. Kapoor delights in this fiction: “The wax is not literally carved by the doorways, although it appears to be.”

Kapoor's meanings are complex and layered. Svayambh, he explains, represents geology, body, blood and viscera, among other themes. It is difficult to engineer such a piece, with its combination of motors, mechanism and soft material requiring careful design and constant maintenance. Questioning the artist's intentions and methods unveils the fiction that the artwork formed itself.

A second wax piece seems more convincingly self-made. Shooting into the Corner (2008–09) is a large air-fired gun that fires 11-kilogram cylinders of red wax across the gallery every 20 minutes. The result is a chaotic pile. No artist directs its creation; random perturbations are caused by variations in the consistency of the wax, the gun pressure and in how the deposits accumulate. Yet it is stage-managed. The art is not in the wax mound but in the whole performance.

Another artful machine generated a set of extruded grey concrete sculptures called Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked (2008–09). These were produced by a scaled-up version of a rapid prototyping machine. Such technology is normally used by engineers to build accurate models from fine threads of molten plastic. Kapoor's larger version extrudes a thick concrete sausage that builds up layers of soft coils, ropes and worms under computer control.

Whereas engineers seek precision with their models, Kapoor delights in his products' imperfections. Yet the appearance of randomness involves technical sleights of hand. To achieve each particular texture, his contraption must be finely tuned. Kapoor deliberately finds a point of balance between opposites — between perfection and imperfection, softness and firmness, movement and repose — to tantalize the viewer.

Kapoor knows he is treading a fine line between artist and entertainer. He says: “It's a short trip from Disneyland to something truly mysterious.” But that mystery is delivered only through precise engineering.