Anish Kapoor audio interview

This is an audio interview with Anish Kapoor at the launch of his Flashback exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery.

The show is a retrospective of Kapoor’s work starting from 1982 with ‘White Sand, Red Millet, Many Flowers’. It opens on Saturday 5 March and goes through to 5 June. Go. See it. The quality of the work, its immediacy, its freshness and vibrancy is energising. Kapoor’s work will have you smiling. This is art to make you happy.

Yet you can also look at these sculptures in a deeper way. You can lose yourself within them - almost literally given their forms and shapes. Texture and colour are powerful motifs for the artist and have always informed and enriched his work - along with the viewer’s appreciation of them. They are, as the artist says, “very sexual” too.

An Arts Council officer at the launch said: "Kapoor has changed the perception of how sculpture can work". She was right.

Anish Kapoor on the left

Kapoor is a lovely man as well.

He speaks without pretension and very precisely. There’s none of the nervous, jargon laden, reference-addled, delivery of so many artists when describing their art.The audio interview explores his work, the notion of beauty, the creative process and examines in particular two sentences Kapoor used in a presentation in the gallery a couple of hours earlier.

These were: “An artist has to insert ambiguity into an over-certain world”. And “The poetry of the pieces lie in what isn’t revealed.”

Kapoor’s answers are fascinating.

The audio was done as part of the Audioboos for the Manchester museums and galleries website, www.creativetourist.com

See below for the interview. One last thing, the exhibition is free. There's no excuse not to go.