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Kapoor dedicates artwork to Ai Weiwei
Sculptor Anish Kapoor has dedicated his largest ever artwork — a truly enormous cathedral-like space made from inflated PVC — to the missing Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Mark Brown reports.
Sculptor Anish Kapoor has dedicated his largest ever artwork — a truly enormous cathedral-like space made from inflated PVC — to the missing Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
The sculptor called for a worldwide day of action where museums and galleries close for one day in sympathy for the plight of his fellow artist. “Why not?” he asked.
Ai, whose sunflower seeds work in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall closed at the weekend, has been missing for about a month, in the hands of the Chinese authorities. He had not been heard from, nor charged with any offence.
“I’ve never met Ai Weiwei but he’s a colleague, an artist,” said Kapoor. “In a very simple way he is heroically recording human existence. All he’s done is to record death by administration, death by corruption, inefficiency. I don’t even think he’s pointing that sharp a finger, frankly.”
Kapoor was speaking at the opening of the Monumenta exhibition in Paris’s Grand Palais —a commission similar to the Turbine Hall in that it is filling a vast space, this time with the added trickiness of having glass windows all around.
What Kapoor has created he’s called Leviathan, a 35-metre tall work — inflated, it’s 13,500 square metres .
(The Guardian)
