Anish KAPOOR

On 10 May 2011, the British artist Anish Kapoor unveil-ed Leviathan, a work conceived for the Monumenta programme at the Grand Palais in Paris. The Leviathan is a sea monster, cited in the Bible several times, usually symbolizing evil. During the Middle Ages it was often portrayed as a giant mouth engulfing souls at the gates of Hell, like a reborn version of the classical world’s ferocious Cerberus. The Paris public were invited to penetrate the inside of a large structure made of rolls of PVC. Visi-tors were literally sucked into the strange animal – half-cephalopod, half extra-terrestrial. With its steady breathing (produced by giant bellows), it actually seemed alive.

The inflatable sculpture was the first of its type that Kapoor had produced, yet appeared in many ways a synthesis of over 30 years of research. Kapoor was born in Bombay in 1954 and moved to the U.K. in the early 1970s. His Leviathan derived, first of all, from the works he has been making in PVC since the turn of the millennium – notably Marsyas, a sculpture which took up the entire length of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2002. This comprised three steel rings forming a hollow installation, evoking both a flower’s corolla and the mouth of a trumpet, and was freely inspired by Titan’s Flaying of Marsyas, with the red PVC membrane evoking the skin of the musical satyr flayed by Apollo.