Galleria Continua in Beijing has the great honour to present Anish KapoorˇŻs first solo exhibition in China, opening on September 1st, 2007.Having been working with the Anglo-Indian artist since 1997, Galleria Continua is now delighted to offer to the local and international public a show conceived for its premises at the 798 Da Shanzi Art District.

Anish Kapoor is an artist who commits himself to construction, in every sense, evaluating the aesthetic perception of space rather than focusing on objects themselves. This is true for his large-scale installations as well as for his smaller art works, where the space is captured inside the earthly setting of the physical limits of the sensory matter, and is returned altered and deformed in a way that induces intensified perception and aesthetic experience.

In the work of Anish Kapoor the meaning of the constructive act is immediate, especially whenever there are sensorial games / illusions: the void that can be perceived as surface, creating shape; the reflection that overturns / erases the image; light that alters / modulates colour; figures that take shape as a result of physical and optical effects; mystical ascensions, ghostly presences which lead elsewhere. The latter, in particular, can describe the impression that comes to the onlooker while entering "Ascension" latest installation in the Beijing Galleria ContinuaˇŻs space.

A massive spiral pathway takes one through a sensorial experience that leads the witness from a low, half-shaded gate, through a darker and narrower corridor, to the final luminous opening.

The claustrophobic feeling that can invade one's experience is suddenly denied by the revelation of ascending and ethereal apparition.

Known and admired for his enigmatic sculptural forms, this new corpus of works shows how Anish Kapoor continues his exploration of the antithesis: inner and outer, emptiness and fullness, presence and absence, the solid versus the intangible.

As Pier Luigi Tazzi wrote "One of the constants in the work of Anish Kapoor is the creation of clefts on the crust of the world, [...] a crust pierced at different levels, at different heights / altitudes, with varying and different degrees of penetration, suggesting a multiplicity of directions and possibilities, of varied thickness and depth, of varied and different impact".