Susan Daitch visits the New York Jewish Museum's Anish Kapoor Early Works Exhibition
In markets in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel, you can find spice shops displaying all kinds of spices, sometimes in discreet piles, sometimes packed into pyramids of the brilliant crimson and scarlet of sumac, smoked paprika, Aleppo pepper, golden-yellow hawaj, shimmering piles of black salt and Urfa Biber pepper. Walking into the scattered shapes of pure color in Anish Kapoor’s Early Works show at the Jewish Museum in New York, is reminiscent of those spice markets' stacks and bowls of color and scent and, in fact, he lived in Israel for three years as a young man.
Kapoor was born in India in 1954 to an Iraqi Jewish mother and a secular Hindu hydrographer, whose profession of mapping oceans kept him often at sea. Anish, one of three brothers, spent most of his childhood in India but, as teenagers, he and another brother were sent to Israel where he worked on a kibbutz and began to be interested in art, in object making. In following years, he traveled across Europe, then landed in art school in London where, after being rejected from Bezalel Academy, he was accepted into Hornsey Art College.
The show at the Jewish Museum explores the evolution of his early work: how the footprints of his cultural influences are present in the saturated colors and minimalist forms of his sculpture and drawings, from the artisanal craftsmanship found both in ceremonial and everyday objects, to the brilliance of Indian textiles, as well as the use of pigment during the holiday of Holi, Festival of Colors, Love, and Spring. When Kapoor returned to England from India in 1979, he began uniting pigment with sculpture, rather than relegating color to the flat picture plane.
The most striking objects in the exhibition are his drawings and sketchbooks: rehearsals for sculptures and installations. The scattered installations present shapes displayed on the floor and attached to the walls, forms made of red, yellow, and blue pigments bound together by the use of plaster. Unseen support structures underneath are made from wood, resin, or polystyrene enabling the pigment to take the form of peaks, cones, hearts, shapes that look like fir trees, like the coronavirus, sandcastles made by a modernist architecture with access to pure color.
The visual language of Kapoor’s work appears humorous and sharply serious at the same time. The viewer is asked to imagine the relationships, the dialogues, between forms in each grouping. Kapoor has said that in these installations he was interested in representing binaries: male and female, earth and spirituality, light and dark, powdery as opposed to solid. In later years the groupings gave way to a focus on increasingly larger individual objects.
There are several pieces that employ the controversial Vanta Black. Vanta Black, the blackest black possible, made of microscopic carbon tubes, is dangerous to work with, and used mainly for industrial purposes for objects sent into space or for coating the inside of telescopes. Vanta Black absorbs all light. Among the works made of this pigment, a diamond shape that looks flat straight on, is actually a four-cornered pyramid when viewed from the side. Kapoor is the only individual in the world who can buy Vanta Black, otherwise its primary use is corporate, in applied technology.
Like his coloured installations, the black pieces resemble things that look familiar, but are not exactly what they seem to resemble. Besides his interest in ritual, Kapoor has said he’s concerned with objects that have “metaphoric potential”. The drawings, sculpture, and installations pull from different identities, with a variety of allusions and what Kapoor calls “fundamental transformation.” The everyday, the ordinary is pushed beyond the everyday, loses its identity, becomes a rarified, essentiality of itself, pared down until shape and pure color remain.
Photos courtesy of The Jewish Museum New York
By Susan Daitch
Anish Kapoor Early Works ran from 24 October 2025 - 1 February 2026 at the Jewish Museum New York, 10128. www.thejewishmuseum.org