Anish Kapoor at the Grand Palais

Each year the Grand Palais invites an internationally renowned artist to turn their vision to the vast Nave of the Palais and create an artwork especially for this space. Now understand that the Nave is massive in size with a height of 45 metres beneath its centre dome and is 200 metres long. This year they choose Anish Kapoor who I've heard of but have never seen any of his work in person.


Anish Kapoor is considered one of today's most important sculptors. His work has profoundly pushed the limits of contemporary sculpture both through his mastery of monumental scale and colourful sensuality and simplicity.


The photo's I took do not do his work justice. I've never seen anything like this before and unfortunately it is finished on June 23'rd so none of my visitors will get a chance to see this as well.


It is massive in size and I deliberately left some people in the picture above to give you a sense of the size of this object. Note the lady standing right up against the sculpture. You can also go inside this thing and admire the beauty of its colour and the shape and its lines. Here is where the camera plays tricks. I set the ISO high in order to avoid camera shake and it turned the colour to this bright reddish hue. In actual fact it is a very dark red which the camera captures to a degree but not exactly.


It is made out of a rubber material that is quite thick and they actually had to blow it up since it is not self supporting. They warn people who go inside that there is negative pressure so it could play havoc with your equilibrium. But they have to constantly blow air into this thing in order to keep it's shape. There is a picture in a book on it that shows it being constructed and it is quite interesting. They also show a picture taken from a helicopter which is a better way to understand the size of this sculpture. I didn't feel compelled to rent a helicopter.


This thing is mind boggling pure and simple.

Together with the Petit Palais (the Little Palace) the Grand Palais (the Big Palace) was built for the World’s Fair, held in Paris in 1900. Both were temporary structures, but once erected there was little willingness to raze them.

Both Palais are made of stone, decorated with coloured mosaics and sculpted friezes. The Grand Palais supports a huge curved-glass roof with a Belle Epoque flourish of a pinnacle. It is a gem of the Art Nouveau period.

For almost a hundred years, the Grand Palais has been a public exhibition centre and boasts of having the largest glass ceiling anywhere in the world which gives the space incomparable luminosity. It is truly a massive structure and thus the challenge for the artist each year to do the space justice.

Life is good ... enjoy


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