Kapoor Crafts Jonah's Monumental Whale

THE INDEPENDENT
By John Fichfield

"Leviathan" (2011) by Anish Kapoor

FRANCE - The British sculptor Anish Kapoor yesterday became the fourth artist to meet the challenge of occupying all 13,500sq m of the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris with a single work of art. Kapoor's offering – an immense, hi-tech zeppelin, or child's balloon, with four brown-maroon PVC blobs, 90m long and 45m high – left the the Parisian art world breathless. The word comes from the Bible, where it is applied to the sea-monster which swallowed Jonah. Kapoor's leviathan offers an opportunity to discover how it might have felt to live "inside the whale". Visitors to the exhibition – from today until 23 June – will be ushered through a revolving door into the echoing calm and ethereal flesh-coloured light inside the largest of the four blobs. "To me, art should also be about taking risks, about going to places where no one has been before," he said. "This is in some ways a simple object but it in other ways it is at the limit of what is technically possible." [link]