Anish Kapoor: Early Works – The Brooklyn Rail

12 December 2025

“If these works are any good, they go beyond composition, like poetry. A good poem is a singular thing…It is this singular presence I am after.” — Anish Kapoor

You round the corner, and there he is, on-screen. The voice on the video is warm, low-key, unassuming, Anish Kapoor responding to off-camera questions about his background and career. Lengthy pauses; a bemused smile. Collar-grazing grey-black hair. Right arm casually draped over the back of a long wooden bench; flowers and leafy bushes behind him. How refreshing: a spring-like day, the artist not taking himself too seriously, his public-facing persona thoughtful, agreeable.

To begin at the beginning of an inner room on the second floor of the Jewish Museum: 1000 Names (1979–1980), a blood-red, half-concealed oval dish surrounded by a ragged, ruffled mass of red pigment, fifteen feet up, hanging upon, emerging from, or penetrating a white wall. As you approach, the red shadow cascading downward becomes more detailed, then granular, at last degenerating into a dusty, red-speckled explosion. The 1000 Names title recurs in many early Kapoor works, a reference to the thousand names of the Indian god Vishnu. Likewise, the artist has remarked that, “red is a powerful thing in Indian culture…and this overt color, this open and visually beckoning color, also associates itself with a dark interior world.” The mystique of fabricating such so-called sculptures sprang from Kapoor’s imagination in his mid-twenties, having returned to London following a trip to India, where he was born in 1954.

Nearby lurks the perfect segue, Part of the Red (1981), a community of three low-lying “Yves Klein blue” structures (as per John Russell in The New York Times): the trio could have been a Mayan temple, a nubby globe, and a volcano encroached upon by two neighbors, possibly a red burial mound and a yellow layered dwelling. Each member of the ensemble is snugly cocooned by a wave-edged aura of color, as if declaring to the spectator, Here I am. The group’s stillness is palpable; you would not dare walk between the works, even had you been permitted. In this sacred space, the antique, ribbed radiators aligned beneath the windows breathed among comrades.

Among the lucid and unpretentious wall labels in the exhibition, the artist explains a multitude of drawings as “a register for my state of being, or rather the state of play in relation to what I think I’m after, whether I’m making paintings, sculpture, or whatever else.” Two 1987 examples, both called Untitled, caught the eye by virtue of their groundedness. The first, brushstrokes visible, is a thickly applied, orange-sienna gouache on board, its outer limits edged with earth; the second, dusty and monochromatic, with a sandy-tinged cornucopia or bugle at the center, floated above its mounting, wanting to escape from the frame.

Read the full article by Neil Baldwin for The Brooklyn Rail here.

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