“Can a man deal with women’s issues?” the British artist wonders. “Is a man allowed to?”
BLOOD LEAKS and gushes from the art in Anish Kapoor’s new show at the Lisson Gallery in London. Almost literally in the case of his silicone and fibreglass reliefs: the gauze dangling beneath them is spattered with scarlet. In his oil paintings, meanwhile, blood-red spurts emanate from corporeal pinks and black cavities and orifices. Black is deathly, says Mr Kapoor, but also, like red, a colour of earth.
Mr Kapoor, a British artist who was born in Mumbai, is best known for his monumental sculptures . His new series of paintings contemplate the idea of ritual, and the meaning of blood—which, as he puts it, is “associated with the abject and impure”. In particular, the paintings evoke menstrual blood. That motif raises another question, a version of which these days confronts artists in every genre and form. “Can a man deal with women’s issues?” Mr Kapoor muses.
Some of the shapes in his paintings—“partial objects”, Mr Kapoor calls them—are distinctly female, but the bodily references of others are more ambiguous. His white canvases suggest purity, and contamination, but also an androgynous disembodiment. In fact, while these paintings trespass on a particular “taboo” in their concern with menstruation, the curves and concavities of much of Mr Kapoor’s previous work likewise convey a preoccupation with bodies and sexuality.
The layout at the Lisson Gallery reinforces the theme of ritual. Several of the canvases hang around a pink onyx sculpture, in which twin ovoid shapes are encased in a sarcophagus or urn. As Mr Kapoor sees it, the blood in his paintings is pouring into the recesses of the stone, which to him resembles aor Jewish ritual bath . To this reviewer’s eye, the sculpture evokes a receptacle for the blood of a sacrifice; Mr Kapoor accepts that interpretation, too.
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