'A New Way of Seeing' featuring Anish Kapoor, Sean Scully and Hiroshi Sugimoto at Jaipur Center for Art, Jaipur, India

18 November 2024

From 23 November – 16 March 2025, Jaipur Center for Art presents 'A New Way of Seeing' curated by Peter Nagy, featuring artists: Tanya Goel, Manjunath Kamath, Anish Kapoor, Alicja Kwade, LN Tallur, Sean Scully, Dayanita Singh and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

The inaugural exhibition to launch the Jaipur Center for Art at the City Palace will be a group show of established artists, half from India and half from other parts of the world. Paintings, sculptures and photography in a variety of styles will be brought together to create an exhibition which acts as a dialogue about how art is made and how we perceive it. What all of the artists have in common is an interest in perception itself as their subject matter. They think about how their works will be viewed by an audience, how they can manipulate or subvert what the viewer will encounter. This is done through a variety of approaches, both materially and conceptually, such as abstraction, multiplication, reflection, and deception. How do we recognize what we are looking at and how do artists manipulate images and materials to cajole, confound, and delight those who experience their artworks?

Hiroshi Sugimoto is primarily a photographer who also works in installation and architectural modes. The four photographs in the exhibition are from two of his best-known bodies of work: Theatres and Seascapes. For the Theatres series, started in 1978, Sugimoto found old-fashioned movie palaces in America and set up his large-format camera from the vantage point of the projection booth. Showing a film in an empty theatre, his camera photographs the entire length of the film projected, resulting in a bright white screen surrounded by an opulent interior. For the Seascapes series, begun in 1980, Sugimoto travels the world to take what is in essence the same picture: a square perfectly bisected by sky on the top and sea at the bottom, in varying tones of black and white. These images defy what we normally associate with photography: a recording of reality that is truthful. In both the Theatres and the Seascapes, Sugimoto employs the physicality of the camera and conditions of time to manipulates what we see.

Sean Scully is a painter and sculptor who started out in the school of Minimalism in the 1970s and by the 1980s broke away from its rigid parameters. Based in New York at the time, the Irish painter was inspired by trips to Morocco and Mexico in the early 1980’s and subsequent watercolours which brought metaphor and spirituality into the artist’s work. The painting in the exhibition is from the artist’s Wall of Light series begun in 1998, nearly twenty years after his initial travels, and exemplifies the artist’s move from monochrome greys into vibrant combinations of colors.

Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential and prolific artists working today. Perhaps most famous for his public sculptures and site-specific installations that are both adventures in form and feats of engineering, Kapoor manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous series of works, experimenting with an astounding variety of materials. In our exhibition are two examples of his concave stainless steel mirror works, which he has been developing since the mid 90’s. These are not sculptures in the traditional sense that one moves around them, viewing them from 360 degrees. Rather they are objects that appear to float off of the wall with vibrant reference to the history of abstract painting. While the concave mirror has historically been employed for scientific purposes for centuries, Kapoor wields the form as a phenomenological inquiry into the parameters of vision and the paradoxes of representation. The viewer, from a distance, first deciphers the color at the center of the mirror and a vague reflection of its surroundings. Upon approaching, one’s own reflection becomes visible, but only in an abstracted form. The shape of the mirror magnifies the scale of the reflected image and also inverts it, turning the world upside down. With both works, Oriental Blue to Clear of 2023 and Magenta to Clear of 2024, the solid colors at the centers of the works dissipate out to the edges, which reveal the pure stainless steel. This further dematerializes their presence, as even the color appears transient and insubstantial. Kapoor has stated: “For me, the illusory is more poetically truthful than the ‘real’.”

Find out more via Jaipur Center for Art.

Image: Sean Scully, Quintana Roo Wall, 2022, Oil on linen, 107 x 122 x 5.7 cm, 42 1/8 x 48 x 2 1/4 in © Sean Scully, Courtesy Lisson Gallery