“This fucking place!” The voice of the artist rang out through the elegant halls of the Accademia, Venice’s most important gallery, home of masterpieces by Titian, Veronese and Giorgione. Frustrated, Anish Kapoor gathered up a bucket and other detritus left over from the technicians’ last-minute adjustments and tidied them away.
He was nervous, he said, as he apologised for his outburst. Kapoor – perhaps best known internationally for his wildly popular reflective sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Cloud Gate – had reason for a little anxiety: he was preparing to open not one but two major exhibitions.
Aside from the show at the Accademia, there is the small matter of an exhibition in the palazzo that he has bought on Venice’s Canale di Cannaregio – the Palazzo Manfrin, a vast space with a particularly grandiose, double-height, frescoed ballroom, currently filled with the red wax-and-steel of his installation Symphony for a Beloved Sun. The palazzo, which is partway through extensive renovation works, is intended to open fully in 2024 as the headquarters of the Anish Kapoor Foundation.
But now, in both venues, Kapoor is debuting a body of sculptural work coated in what has been called “Kapoor black”.
Vantablack, as it is officially known, is a nanotechnology that absorbs 99.96% of visible light – the world’s most intense black, as it has been described. It is produced by a British company, Surrey NanoSystems, with which the artist has working since he read about it and its founder, Ben Jensen, in the Guardian eight years ago. “I wrote to him asking if we could work together. He said Vantablack had been developed for the defence industry.” Nevertheless, Jensen agreed.
The effect of the light-absorbing coating is uncanny. Seen head on, the blacker-than-black sculptures appear two-dimensional. Then, when the angle of view is changed, they reveal themselves to be solid shapes.
“It is a material sprayed on a surface at a nano scale,” explained Kapoor, “then put in a reactor – they won’t tell me precisely what this reactor is – but anyway, it is raised to a very high temperature. The particles are raised upright and the light get trapped between them.”
Aside from the new black works, both exhibitions are currently filled with Kapoor’s instantly recognisable works: enormous heaps of bright pigment; rooms choked with enormous globs of scarlet wax; chambers in which are hung his strange, distorting mirror-sculptures; ceilings appearing to drip or ooze with scarlet, fleshy innards.
Asked if the foundation was the means of securing his legacy – as is generally the way with artists’ foundations – Kapoor, who is 68, replied: “Fucking legacy! Who gives a shit? The work will do what it does. Securing a legacy? That’s daft. It’s somewhere for me to play. That’s how I see it.”
The story of Kapoor’s adventures in black has not been without controversy in the art world. the artist Stuart Semple, for example, poked fun at the fact that Kapoor was exclusively licensed to use the Vantablack technology by declaring that he would make available the world’s “pinkest pink” to anyone who could definitively prove they were not Anish Kapoor.
In return, Kapoor got hold of some anyway, dunked his middle finger in it, and posted an image online with the caption, “Up yours #pink”.
“It’s too stupid for words,” said Kapoor of the spat. “This is not something that comes out of a tube. It’s incredibly complicated. I’ve been working for seven or eight years on it and made 10 to 12 works.”
Kapoor said that the use of the intense black continues his long-term interest in the idea of being and non-being. Referring to the great collection of the Accademia, he said: “In the Renaissance there were two great discoveries: perspective and the fold.” Both them gave the illusion of depth, and the fold – in depictions of fabric, and as a characteristic of human flesh – gives the illusion of life, or of being. Using “Kapoor black” technology removes the fold, the crease, any hint of 3D, or of “being”.
“Painting is the giving of appearance to objects,” he said. “I’ve been giving objects disappearance.”
Asked why he had decided to set up his foundation in Venice rather than the UK or the US, the artist said that he had always loved the city – in which he represented Great Britain at the 1990 Biennale. He was magnetised by this water-filled place where Stravinsky stipulated he must be buried, with its intimations of death and darkness via Thomas Mann and Luchino Visconti.
“I’m dismayed with England,” said the artist, who was born in Mumbai and moved to London to study at art school. “I’ve lived there for 40-something years, and it’s not just the politics and Brexit, it’s what’s happened to our spirit. We’ve changed from being inclusive to being exclusive. It makes me terribly sad.”
• The exhibitions at the Accademia and Palazzo Manfrin are open to the public until 9 October.
