Blood and Earth: Anish Kapoor creates a limited edition of prints to support the Peggy Guggenheim Collection’s fundraising campaign.
Blood and Earth is a limited-edition polymer gravure by the internationally renowned artist Anish Kapoor, created to support the museum’s ongoing fundraising campaign “Together for the PGC”. Kapoor, who has been a member of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection Advisory Board since 2019, will donate 100 prints of his enigmatic work Blood and Earth to donors who contribute a minimum of €5,000 to the fundraising campaign. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection launched the fundraising campaign on July 8, after incurring severe economic losses during a three-month closure, which amounted to over 2 million euros that have yet to be recovered.
“I am happy to be able to support an institution like the Peggy Guggenheim Collection with my work, especially given my connection to the museum and a unique city in the world like Venice,” said Kapoor. “The long period of lockdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has caused enormous damage to everyone, including the world of culture. Today it is our duty to help cultural institutions recover, thus ensuring that they are able to make their cultural treasures accessible to all again.”
“We are honored and extremely grateful to Anish Kapoor for this generous gesture towards our museum,” said Director Karole P. B. Vail. “We are tenaciously pursuing the campaign in support of the PGC so that the museum can offer visitors, both today and in the future, daily opening hours, a full exhibition program, and the many activities it has always offered free of charge. We thank those who have thus far believed in and supported this fundraiser. It is also thanks to these initial results that the museum is now open again 6 days a week. However, we are aware that there is still a long way to go in reaching our goal and recovering the losses incurred by the 90 days of closure.”
Two works by Kapoor are on view in the garden of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection: a sculpture in sandstone, Untitled (1993) belonging to the Hannelore B. and Rudolph B. Schulhof Collection, and the monumental Untitled in black granite (2007) on long-term loan to the museum.
Anish Kapoor was born in Mumbai, 1954 and moved to England to study at Hornsey College of Art in London (1973–77) and Chelsea School of Art (1977–78). His first solo exhibition was held at the studio of Patrice Alexandre in Paris in 1980 and marked the beginning of his intense exhibition activity. In the early 1980s his sculptural oeuvre focused on multiple forms in a continuous dialogue between two- and three-dimensionality. This made him a central figure of New British Sculpture, which included artists such as Tony Cragg and Antony Gormley. Throughout the 80s, Kapoor continued to investigate the dialectic of opposites and created semi abstract sculptures coated in pure pigment. In the 1990s his works became increasingly monumental and explored the notion of the void with either hollowed out blocks or filled in holes. Kapoor participated in the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990, where he was awarded the Premio Duemila, and won the Turner Prize in 1991 which made him internationally famous. He began exhibiting world-wide and receiving public and private commissions which pushed the boundaries already present in his work between sculpture and architecture to increasingly expansive territory. In 2004, he unveiled a commission for Chicago’s Millennium Park, Cloud Gate, a monumental concave mirror work which has gone on to become not only an iconic landmark to the city but one of the most world renowned public sculptures. Significant exhibitions of his work have been held at the Fondazione Prada in Milan (1995); Hayward Gallery in London (1998); National Archaeology Museum in Naples (2003); Royal Academy of Arts, London (2009); Martin–Gropius–Bau, Berlin (2012); Sakıp Sabancı Müzesi, Istanbul (2013); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM, Mexico City; Museo d’Arte Contemporane, Rome (2016); CAFA Art Museum/Imperial Ancestral Temple, Beijing (2019) Anish Kapoor will be the first British artist to be honoured with a major exhibition at the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice which will be presented during the Venice Biennale 2022.