Last Month, the New York Guggenheim Museum unveiled Anish Kapoor’s large scale sculptural installation, Memory. A 24 tons steel structure, Memory (2008) is a site specific work designed to engage the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiraling museum. Speaking at the press conference, Kapoor commented on the relationship between work and site.

Deviating from his earlier works, Kapoor did not stop short at the state of spatial suspension. Entering the gallery, visitors perceive a gaping, fathomless black hole carved into white wall, a negative form of indeterminate depth or shape. On the other side, Memory’s corporal form awaits them with an intimidating mass of rusty metal. It’s heavy bulk, as if infected by a case of giantism, dominates the surrounding architecture. Contrasting presence with absence, material with visual, and production with effect, Kapoor challenges the minimalist tradition of sculpture, with its insistence on materiality and fervent anti-illusionism.

Sometimes perceived as an indulgent sensualist, Kapoor can be surprisingly articulate on conceptual points.  He delivers here some well measured remarks concerting the subject of sculpture.