Anish Kapoor Unseen

The British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor has taken over the museum’s spaces with his impressive sculptures and installations extending across most of ARKEN. The exhibition Anish Kapoor – Unseen is the first major solo exhibition in Scandinavia featuring Anish Kapoor.Anish Kapoor is one of the world's leading artists. His monumental sculptures and installations speak directly to our senses and emotions. With his unique use of materials, shapes, surfaces, and colours, Kapoor draws us into his artworks, turning the world upside down – often quite literally.

The absence and the void are central in Kapoor's art. He gives what we cannot see a sensory form for example when water flows into an invisible abyss in Descension (2014), or when he lets us gaze into the dark interior of Memory (2008). Despite the impressive scale of his works, something remains hidden: something we can neither see nor fully understand. The exhibition addresses this paradoxical aspect of Kapoor's works: we feel the effect of the works with our bodies and senses, yet there is more at play than what meets the eye.

In the exhibition we can explore Kapoor's unique universe. Here, a selection of his most significant, monumental artworks created over his career spanning more than 40 years is presented. Several of them are integrated into the museum's architecture, altering the spaces, and interrupting the usual routes through the building. They open new ways of seeing and experiencing the world, and together they provide a unique insight into Kapoor's artistic production.

Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai, India. Since 1973, he has been based in the UK. Kapoor works with a wide range of media, from sculpture and architectural work to painting and drawing, using materials such as pigment, wax, granite, marble, limestone, and polished stainless steel. His art has been exhibited at major exhibition venues around the world, from the Palace of Versailles outside Paris to the Royal Academy in London. He has also created several iconic public sculptures – perhaps most famously, the enormous mirror artwork Cloud Gate (2004) in Chicago, which has become the city’s landmark, affectionately nicknamed ‘The bean’.‍