Anish Kapoor unveils a new commission at MAST Foundation in Bologna, Italy
26 October 2017
Anish Kapoor’s latest permanent commission, Reach (2017, was unveiled outside MAST Foundation in Bologna earlier this month as part of the centre’s exhibition ‘Anish Kapoor: Places of Origin Monuments for the 21st Century’, which continues until 14 January 2018.
The elegant stainless steel arch presents an illusion of the world turned upside down. It inverts and stretches the surrounding natural environment, reflecting the sky and city of Bologna as well as the individuals standing beneath. The sculpture appears to be at once organically-formed and industrially manufactured, situated ambivalently between the concave and convex whilst presenting new figurative tensions.
The exhibition on view at MAST brings together a number of works by Kapoor to show the fluid boundaries between sculpture and architecture. The selection demonstrates Kapoor’s versatility to execute architectural forms – in the figure of the tower, the vortex, the tunnel –that widens the physical and abstract properties and designs of his sculpture.
The opening, which coincided with the inauguration of the Biennale di Fotografia dell’Industria e del Lavoro, included a brief conversation between the artist and MAXXI Arte director, Bartolomeo Pietromarchi. The aim of the Biennale, in Pietromarchi’s words, is to explore the “world of work, a central theme of our contemporaneity…which is transformed through the development of new technologies and the recovery of traditions.”
