Suck is a precipitous, and seemingly endless, curved metal chute intruding into the earth like a subterranean flume. Set amidst Jupiter Artland’s woodland, it is surrounded by a seventeen-feet-high square cage.

Suck‘s title is scarcely needed to evoke the association with being swallowed up or subsumed. The void descends to an infinite depth into which a viewer is drawn, engendering a sense of dislocation and a fear of being pulled into the abyss.

In a wide-ranging discussion with the renowned philosopher Julia Kristeva, Kapoor noted that for him ‘a void object is not an empty object; its potential for generative possibility is ever present. It is pregnant… Emptiness becomes fullness.’ The artist went on to suggest that this potential coexists with the sense of negation or threat in a work such as Suck. The cage surrounding the metal sink hole might operate to contain whatever might lie within and to keep viewers out – but to whom or what it offers protection remains an open question.

Biography

Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor CBE RA was born in 1954 in Mumbai. He studied at Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art and Design. He now lives and works in both London and Venice. Renowned for public sculptures that are both adventures in form and feats of engineering, Kapoor manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous bodies of work. His voids and protrusions summon up deep-felt metaphysical polarities of presence and absence, concealment and revelation. His geometric forms from the early 1980s rise up from the floor and appear to be made of pure pigment, while the viscous, blood-red wax sculptures started in the early 2000s explode the quiet of the gallery environment. His work contains multiple resonances with mythologies of the ancient world – Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman – and with modern times.

Over the past twenty years Kapoor has exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally. His solo shows include presentations at Kunsthalle Basel; Tate and the Hayward Gallery in London; Reina Sofia, Madrid; CAPC, Bordeaux; Haus der Kunst, Munich; ICA Boston; MAK, Vienna; Liverpool Cathedral; and ‘Unseen’, ARKEN, Ishøj, Denmark. He has also participated internationally in group shows at Whitechapel, the Royal Academy and Serpentine Gallery in London, Documenta IX in Kassel, Moderna Museet in Stockholm and Jeu de Paume and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

He represented Britain at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990 with Void Field (1989). Kapoor was awarded the Premio Duemila at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and the Turner Prize Award in 1991. Kapoor was awarded a CBE in 2003 and a Knighthood in 2013 for services to visual arts.