A special intervention by Anish Kapoor in Italy is Parabola, an imposing gray monolith installed in 2004 in the cloister of the former monastery of Santa Marta in Bergamo. The fifteenth-century cloister is the only remaining part of the thirteenth-century monastery, partly acquired in 1914 by the Banca Mutua Popolare di Bergamo, now Intesa Sanpaolo, and subsequently restored by engineer Luigi Angelini.
The work, part of Intesa Sanpaolo’s contemporary art collections, is a rectangular monolith made of rough, matted black granite. On the sides, two large circular cavities, perfectly smooth and reflective, mirror the surrounding environment defined by the cloister’s columns when viewed upside down. The materiality of the stone contrasts with the surface of these cavities: inside them, the viewer’s reflection is seen, as elusive and mobile as the sculpture appears solid and stationary.
Intesa Sanpaolo is Main Partener of the exhibition Anish Kapoor. Untrue Unreal.
Cover: Anish Kapoor, Parabola, 2004. Collezione Intesa Sanpaolo, Chiostro di Santa Marta, Bergamo. Courtesy Archivio Patrimonio Artistico, Intesa Sanpaolo.