MONUMENTA - Anish Kapoor – Leviathan

11 May - 23 June 2011 at Grand Palais, Paris

A challenge

Every year, to have a great artist of our own time create a remarkable artwork. To treat it as both precious and accessible to all, at the heart of the world’s most visited city, in the exceptional setting of the Nave of the Grand Palais des Champs-Elysées in Paris. MONUMENTA took a gamble as simple as it was ambitious, and its first three years have met with growing success, proving that contemporary creative work can be appreciated both by the critics and a wide public.

It is this challenge that Anish Kapoor takes up on his own terms for Monumenta 2011, from 11th May to 23rd June. Giving a face to the concept of the universal artist, the Bombay-born British sculptor fascinates and enchants with his artworks at the edge of worlds. The falsely simple lines, often achieved by technological exploits, as well as their immediate visual impact, changes those who explore his artworks by foot or by eye – changing them in both how they see and how they think. To create an aesthetic and physical shock, an experience of colour that is simultaneously poetic, thoughtful and formidable, one on a scale with the verticality and light of the Nave, “this interior greater than any exterior”: thus can be summarized Anish Kapoor’s ambition for MONUMENTA 2011, for his return to Paris thirty years after his very first exhibition.