Arte Continua is pleased to present Anish Kapoor’s first solo exhibition in Cuba. Anish Kapoor is one of the most significant artists of our times. His work is distinguished by its boundless capacity to reinvent artistic language, in its monumental dimension as in its more intimate one.

Likewise, from November 26, 2016, to March 26, 2017, Arte Continua will engage the public into a survey of suggestive polarities capable of affecting the way we perceive things. In May 2015, Anish Kapoor took part in the XII Havana Biennial. In collaboration with Galleria Continua, he submitted Wounds and absent objects, a site-specific installation for the cinema-theater Payret. This past November, at the exhibition Follia Continua! 25 años de Galleria Continua, a collaboration between Galleria Continua and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, he exhibited the work Endless Column (1992). On the occasion of his solo show at Arte Continua, the artist will showcase works that continue to redefine and expand the concept of sculpture in art. A negative space for Kapoor does not yield an absolute void.

In fact, the artist states: “The void does not really exist because we are constantly filling it with our expectations and fears. My sculptures that are called empty objects therefore contain a possibility. They stimulate a philosophical thought but are not the answer to anything. They simply present a condition; you have to do the rest”.

Kapoor’s research casts its fundaments in non-forms and auto-generated objects, man and self-awareness, the mind and the experience of things, and the universality of time and space. The present exhibition project was designed specifically for Arte Continua Havana’s spaces. Its pace is set by five sculptures that investigate the relationship between fullness and the void.

Due to the way in which they are colored, their concavities’ dimensions are not intelligible; gazing at them fosters a sense of vertigo because, according to the artist2: “The void (…) has many presences. Its presence as fear is towards the loss of the self, from a non-object to a non-self.”

Anish Kapoor was born in Mumbai in 1954. In the 70s he moved to London, where he currently lives and works. Kapoor’s artistic career consists of two complementary phases. The former includes works from the early 80s: sculptural objects bearing forms shifting between the abstract and the natural, entirely covered with monochrome pigment, the intensity of which conceals the manufactured origin of the work and suggests the idea of the crossing of boundaries. In the 90s, he explored what may be recognized as the distinctive features of his output: increasingly monumental sculptures that represent his staging of the void, rendered tangible by a cavity that fills them up or a material that empties them out.

In the past thirty years his work has been shown in several of the world’s most important museums and galleries. He has had solo shows at the Kunsthalle in Basel, the Tate Gallery and Hayward Gallery in London, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, in Bordeaux, the CCBB Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and, more recently, at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Royal Academy of London. In 2010 he showed for the first time in India, with solo exhibitions at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and at Mehboob Studios in Mumbai. The artist has taken part in group exhibitions organized by institutions such as the Serpentine Gallery in London, documenta IX in Kassel, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Louvre and Grand Palais in Paris, the Guggenheim in Berlin, New York and Bilbao. Anish Kapoor’s works are held in numerous public and private collections, including the MoMA in New York and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Amongst the best known and most highly acclaimed public commissions realized by Kapoor in recent years, there are: Marsyas (Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London), Cloud Gate (Millennium Park, Chicago), Underground (within the medieval tower of Sant’Agostino, Arte Continua, San Gimignano) and Earth cinema (Arte Pollino un altro sud con Arte Continua, Basilicata).

Anish Kapoor received the prize Premio Duemila at the Venice Biennale in 1990, the Turner Prize in 1991, and was awarded an Honorary Fellowship at the London Institute in 1997. In 2003 he received a CBE. Since 2001 he has been an honorary member of the Royal Institute of British Architecture. Recent public commissions include: Ark Nova, Lucerne Festival, Matsushima, Japan (2013); Orbit, Olympic Games, London, in collaboration with Cecil Balmond (2012); Leviathan, Grand Palais, Paris; and Monumenta 2011 (2011). In 2015, a major retrospective dedicated to the artist was held at the Palace of Versailles, and his solo show Descension at Galleria Continua San Gimignano.