Anish Kapoor: Untrue Unreal

Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence presents Anish Kapoor: Untrue Unreal, a major new exhibition devised and produced with the celebrated artist who has revolutionized the notion of sculpture in contemporary art. Curated by Arturo Galansino, Director General of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, the show features monumental installations, immersive environments and thought-provoking forms that forge an original and captivating dialogue between the art of Anish Kapoor and the architecture and audience of Palazzo Strozzi.

With a wide range of early, mid-career and recent works, including a new architecturally scaled work conceived for the Renaissance courtyard, the exhibition offers an opportunity to engage directly with the artist’s oeuvre in all its versatility, discord, entropy, and ephemerality. Palazzo Strozzi becomes a venue in which visitors are called on to question their senses.

In Anish Kapoor’s art, the unreal merges with the untrue, transforming or negating the common perception of reality. He invites us to explore a world where the boundaries between what is true and false dissolve, opening the doors to the realm of the impossible. One of the distinguishing features is the way Kapoor’s works transcend their materiality. Pigment, stone, steel, wax, and silicone are manipulated – carved, polished, saturated and formed – to the point of a dissolution of boundaries between the plastic and the immaterial.

Kapoor’s works merge empty and full space, absorbing and reflecting surface, geometrical and biomorphic form. With his art, Kapoor alters the common perception of reality by a unique visual language that embraces painting, sculpture, and architectural forms. Among the works on display: Svayambhu (2007), a monumental block of red wax that molds its formless matter in relation to the architecture it pushes through, Endless Column (1992), a large column that seems to surpass the limits of physical space, and Non-Object Black where the Vantablack pigment, capable of absorbing more than 99.9% of visible light, offers a meditation on the immateriality that permeates our world. In the experimentation with techniques and materials, standout works include Vertigo (2006) and Newborn (2019), mirror sculptures that reflect and distort the space, as well as Angel (1990), large sculptures in intense blue pigment that suggest the transformation of slate slabs into pieces of sky. In a world where reality seems increasingly elusive and manipulable, Anish Kapoor challenges us to seek truth beyond appearances, inviting us to explore the territory of the untrue and the unreal.