Anish Kapoor's First Solo Show in Beijing this Winter

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Anish Kapoor’s first solo show in Beijing is anchored by Ascension, 2007, which fills the central space at this outpost of the Italian gallery. Participants enter the installation through an unlit spiraling hallway and are led through disorienting darkness to a sunlit core chamber, the stage for a tall and slender cyclone of rising smoke. The column shifts and pulses as viewers move through the space. The flow alternates between laminar and turbulent, straight and spiraling, cohesive and dissipated, as it moves up from unknown sources below the damp wooden floor to a black trumpeting exhaust tube at the top of the skylighted chamber.

Other works made by Kapoor between 2003 and 2007 fill two adjacent viewing platforms. Two alabaster cubes are exquisitely penetrated with broad, concave sculpting that refines the material’s thickness from dense block to thin, glowing surface. The video Wounds & Absent Objects, 2003, offers a dark room with pulsing optic shifts in supersaturated color orbs. A triptych of "Chinese Landscapes," 2007, emit smoke through pierced canvas surfaces painted in thinly applied monochromatic white, black, and royal purple.

The works combine to absorb viewers into aesthetically intensified environments where the microcosmic and the macrocosmic are mutually present and inspiring. They provide a brief but satisfying introduction to Kapoor’s minimalist manipulations of atmosphere and his quasi-religious treatment of materials.