καιρός remembered

By: Louk Vreeswijk

Oct 19 2014

Tags: Art

Category: Australia, Oceania

Leave a comment

It’s not easy to write sense about art. I tried my best in last week’s post regarding another work by Anish Kapoor, but I’ll take it a bit more easy this time and quote some lines from the booklet that was distributed at the exhibition in Sydney in 2013.

“My Red Homeland is a monumental wax sculpture of 25 tons of paraffin wax mixed with a deep red pigment. In this enormous circular sculpture, a large motorised steel blade slowly traces the circumference of the structure, which measures 12 meters in diameter. Each rotation of the blade takes approximately one hour, as it cuts a course through the wax, dissecting and reshaping it into endless new forms. (…..) Red is the colour that Kapoor has repeatedly used throughout his career, suggestive of both the body and cultural traditions. In My Red Homeland, the combination of the strong colour and material quality of the wax draws associations with organic matter such as blood, to stimulate a response from the viewer that is not only emotional but also physical.”

It felt in a way appropriate to see this big red sculpture at an exhibition in Australia, the big red continent with the well known enormous red mass of bare rock, called Uluru or Ayers Rock, in the centre of the country. Sure, the red of the Australian soil is not the same as the red of Kapoor’s artwork, but I like the idea to depart from here for an evocation in the next few weeks of the red homeland of Australia.

Photos of the week: Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art – My Red Homeland 2003, Anish Kapoor – Australia 2013