Anish Kapoor
'Earth Sky on Red Ground'
Featuring 15 canvases ranging from 2012 to 2022, Earth Sky on Red Ground is the first museum exhibition in the U.S. devoted entirely to the painting practice of Anish Kapoor, an eminent artist recognized for his peerless international renown. His iconic sculptures in a diverse spectrum of materials often confound the viewer’s perception. Yet Kapoor’s paintings simultaneously emphasize the viscerality of our physical existence and the metaphysical inner worlds we share. The artist has intrepidly accomplished this feat with his expressive technique, characterized by sensuous brushwork and an immersive scale that envelops the viewer in the works’ powerful traction. Kapoor’s canvases feature abstract forms with a forceful gestural boldness that is deftly achieved in thickly impastoed oil paint. The works’ timeless titles convey an almost ritualistic dialogue with the long arc of the medium and our collective history. The immediacy of Kapoor’s approach to painting animates this integral part of his practice, demonstrating its centrality to the truly incomparable creative outpouring of a contemporary master.
Featuring 15 canvases ranging from 2012 to 2022, Earth Sky on Red Ground is the first museum exhibition in the U.S. devoted entirely to the painting practice of Anish Kapoor, an eminent artist recognized for his peerless international renown. His iconic sculptures in a diverse spectrum of materials often confound the viewer’s perception. Yet Kapoor’s paintings simultaneously emphasize the viscerality of our physical existence and the metaphysical inner worlds we share. The artist has intrepidly accomplished this feat with his expressive technique, characterized by sensuous brushwork and an immersive scale that envelops the viewer in the works’ powerful traction. Kapoor’s canvases feature abstract forms with a forceful gestural boldness that is deftly achieved in thickly impastoed oil paint. The works’ timeless titles convey an almost ritualistic dialogue with the long arc of the medium and our collective history. The immediacy of Kapoor’s approach to painting animates this integral part of his practice, demonstrating its centrality to the truly incomparable creative outpouring of a contemporary master.
About the artist
Anish Kapoor (b. 1954, Mumbai, India; lives and works in London and Venice) is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading contemporary artists. Renowned for sculptures that are adventures in form and engage public space, Kapoor maneuvers between vastly different scales across numerous series of work. Immense PVC skins flayed or inflated within architecture or landscape; paintings undulating with a viscerally abject physicality; mirrors that suck the viewer into the vertiginous concavity of their aura; and pigmented voids, carved into stone or within the ground beneath us that confound our perception. Kapoor’s work situates our inner world into the world around us; turned inside out, its inversions and protrusions summon up deep-felt metaphysical polarities of container and contained, being and non-being, that disrupt our quotidian reality.
Kapoor studied at Hornsey College of Art, London (1973–77), followed by postgraduate studies at the Chelsea School of Art, London (1977–78). Recent solo exhibitions include the Jewish Museum, New York (2025); Liverpool Cathedral, U.K. (2024); ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark (2024); Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy (2023–24); Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia and Palazzo Priuli Manfrin, Venice, Italy (2022); Modern Art Oxford, U.K. (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, Shenzhen, China (2021); Houghton Hall, Norfolk, U.K. (2020); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020); Surge at Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2019); the Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum and Imperial Ancestral Temple, Beijing (2019); CorpArtes, Santiago, Chile (2019); Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London (2019); Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2018); Descension at Public Art Fund, Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 1, New York (2017); Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires (2017); MAST Foundation, Bologna, Italy (2017); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City (2016); Couvent de la Tourette, Éveux, France (2015); Château de Versailles, France (2015); and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow (2015). He represented Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990 with Void Field (1989), for which he was awarded the Premio Duemila for Best Young Artist, and won the Turner Prize in 1991. Large-scale public projects include Cloud Gate (2004) in Millennium Park, Chicago; Ark Nova (2013), the world’s first inflatable concert hall, in Japan; and Monte Sant’Angelo Station in Naples, Italy. Kapoor was awarded a CBE in 2003 and a Knighthood in 2013 for services to visual arts.
Install Views
Credits
Earth Sky on Red Ground is organized by SCAD Museum of Art chief curator Daniel S. Palmer and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2026.
