Words Jim Larkin

Indian Modern

Anish Kapoor probes the great mysteries at ICA/Boston

Through September 7

www.icaboston.org

Anish Kapoor is one of the most compelling sculptors on the global art scene. The London-based artist appeared in the 1980s with sumptuous installations of enigmatic mounds of sculpted powder pigments. Over the ensuing years, there were smooth and rough stone sculptures carved with dark cavities, intimating metaphysical dualities, and massive, mirror-surfaced forms like “Cloud Gate,” at Chicago’s Millennium Park, that reflect and distort their surroundings. More recent works like “Svayambh,” an enormous installation of carmine-colored wax exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, challenge the boundaries between art and architecture.

Through all these phases, Kapoor has remained constant in his subtle evocations of his native India, Western classicism, and existential mysteries. This summer, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston is having the first survey of his work in a United States museum in 15 years. The show features a selection of pieces created over the past 28 years, including a new resin work, that demonstrate the breadth of Kapoor’s cultural probing, the versatility of his forms, and the daring of his material deployment, which has ranged from bronze to PVC. Prepare to have your perceptions altered.

Past, Present, Future (2006), wax mixed with oil-based paint. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.

Marsupial (2006), paint and resin. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.

Inwendig Volle Figur (2006), paint and resin. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery.

Photos Dave Morgan

L.A. Dreamer

John Lautner gets star treatment at the Hammer

July 13 to October 12
www.hammer.ucla.edu

It’s a safe bet that most Americans know John Lautner as the architect of the Chemosphere (1960), the spectacular, Frisbee-like house perched on a column on a hillside above Los Angeles. But his reputation as a Jetsons-inspired fantasist hardly matches the real backstory.

Between Heaven and Earth, at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles this summer will demonstrate why this mid-century visionary is known as an “architect’s architect,” admired for the originality and diversity of his architectural forms, and his keen responsiveness to both Southern California’s natural environ-ment and its fast-evolving car culture.

It was Lautner, after all, who invented a whole new genre of roadway architecture with the Googie coffeeshop. Yet he was also among the heirs to Frank Lloyd Wright’s legacy, having completed a six-year fellowship at Taliesin in the late 1940s, and supervised, among several projects, the construction of his Wingspread House in Racine, Wisconsin. As to Lautner’s later designs, which many deemed space age, they were in fact his fresh, highly sensitive responses to the landscape. The Chemosphere, for example, was simply his neat solution to a challenging canyon site. “The typical way to approach it would have been to bulldoze out a lot and put in 30-foot-high retaining wall to try to hold up the mountain, which is just insane,” he once observed.

Incredibly, the Hammer show is the first major exhibition of Lautner’s work. It will trace the entire arc of his career to reveal how this legend, who died in 1994 at 83, conceived designs so far ahead of their time. Curated by historian Nicholas Olsberg and architect Frank Escher, it will employ newly crafted large-scale models and digital animations to provide a better sense of the internal spaces of his buildings and his construction processes. Short films by prize-winning documentarian Murray Grigor will convey the sensation of movement through these buildings and their sites to evoke the extraordinary “vitality within repose” that Lautner so magically conjured.

The construction drawings for the Chemosphere (1960). Courtesy of the John Lautner Archive, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. ©The John Lautner Foundation.

The Chemosphere in Los Angeles at night.

Photos Joshua White