The Public Art Fund in New York will install Anish Kapoor’s water-based sculpture Descension in Brooklyn Bridge Park this summer, to give pause to the riverfront greenspace’s masses of ambling traffic from May 3 through September 10. It will be the first appearance in North America for the sculpture, different versions of which have shown in India and Versailles. Descension is a funnel of spiraling water treated with natural black dye and made to descend whirlpool-like below the ground. Around a railing, viewers peer into the sculpture’s perpetual movement of water spilling down into a dark void.
Kapoor was named winner of the 2017 Genesis Prize earlier this month, and New Yorkers might recall the dizzying experience of seeing their reflections magnified by his 35-foot-diameter concave Sky Mirror that was installed by the Public Art Fund at Rockefeller Center in 2006.
In a statement, Public Art Fund Director and Chief Curator Nicholas Baume said, “Anish Kapoor reminds us of the contingency of appearances: our senses inevitably deceive us. With Descension, he creates an active object that resonates with changes in our understanding and experience of the world.”
On May 3, the day the sculpture opens to the public, Kapoor will discuss the work at a Public Art Fund Talk at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
Kapoor was named winner of the 2017 Genesis Prize earlier this month, and New Yorkers might recall the dizzying experience of seeing their reflections magnified by his 35-foot-diameter concave Sky Mirror that was installed by the Public Art Fund at Rockefeller Center in 2006.
In a statement, Public Art Fund Director and Chief Curator Nicholas Baume said, “Anish Kapoor reminds us of the contingency of appearances: our senses inevitably deceive us. With Descension, he creates an active object that resonates with changes in our understanding and experience of the world.”
On May 3, the day the sculpture opens to the public, Kapoor will discuss the work at a Public Art Fund Talk at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics.