A Venice fly trap: Skip Kapoor, see Singh

Blood and gore. Infinite black. The occasional vagina even. It is not necessarily the art one feels like travelling a considerable distance for. But I make an exception for Anish Kapoor. The Mumbai-born British artist currently has a solo exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery.

His themes have remained consistent. As has his fondness for scale. Enormous inflated red forms appear to burst through walls, while elsewhere wax, silicone and resin take on the colour and texture of flesh, blood, and entrails. Giant circles of his signature black pull you in and refuse to let go. The sheer bloody horror of it all can be overwhelming. But then there are always his signature sky-gazing mirrors, resonating with blue to cool the mind. On a roof terrace, a couple had been installed reflecting London and its visitors, pulling both into a strange, distorted dance.

Walking to the gallery recently, I found myself thinking about a trip I just made to the Venice Biennale. There I had skipped Palazzo Manfrin, where Kapoor has established a major exhibition space of his own. I knew roughly what awaited me. Instead, I found myself drawn to Dayanita Singh at Archivio di Stato, housed in the former convent of the Frari. It could hardly be a better setting.


Singh's wooden structures form solemn columns filled with photographs of archives, books and mountains of paper, records seemingly withering away after their purpose has been forgotten. Yet, there is colour too: bundles wrapped in cloth dyed blue and red, the latter not so far removed from Kapoor's visceral palette.

The two artists could hardly be further apart in style or scale. Yet, both possess the instant familiarity of the truly great. Elsewhere in Venice, Korean artist Lee Ufan offered another contrast, taking over 8 galleries of San Marco Art Centre. We had encountered his enormous outdoor sculptures on the Japanese island of Naoshima. Here everything was quieter, with panels carrying delicate, seemingly random strokes.

Lee moves between painting and sculpture, between the internal and the spatial, making the familiar world briefly strange again. His work shows how the monumental can be brought back to human scale without losing its unusual power to captivate.

It is this tightrope one constantly navigates--between spectacle and intimacy, between works that overwhelm and those that ask you to come closer. Kapoor once filled the Grand Palais in Paris with a gigantic red inflatable structure. Inside, it felt like entering a womb, floating through a red world that was both physical and strangely ethereal. Venice demands a different rhythm.

Navigating the Biennale's national pavilions feels like travelling between countries. Curated by Koyo Kouoh, 'In Minor Keys' invited visitors to tune in to quieter frequencies of melancholy, hope, joy, and transcendence, often foregrounding smaller works and lesser-known artists rather than grand statements. Yet, national pavilions inevitably also want to make an impact.

The biennial journey to Venice has consequently become something of a pilgrimage, although perhaps less to worship art than to surrender in order to get lost in it. For days you walk narrow back streets and follow canals in search of pavilions that sometimes seem determined to remain hidden. You step into an apparently abandoned church and discover an enormous work by an artist from Kosovo you had never encountered before. Around another corner, an Ethiopian artist sends you down a completely different rabbit hole.

Perhaps, that is why skipping Kapoor in Venice did not matter. His infinite black was always going to catch up with me, swallowing me whole and eventually delivering me to London. It was the intimacy of Dayanita Singh's work, surrounded by centuries of archival accumulation, that stayed with me most.

Scale, in the end, matters less than we think. Art makes destinations out of places. But the journey towards it is often the work that lingers the longest.