Anish Kapoor, the India-born contemporary sculptor, will get a stand-alone exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in late 2009, RA Secretary and Chief Executive Charles Saumarez Smith said.
The show of Kapoor’s work, filling all of the main-floor galleries, will look back at the evolution of the Turner Prize- winner’s career, Saumarez Smith, who left the National Gallery’s directorship for the RA last year, said in an interview.
He also outlined architect David Chipperfield’s plans to renovate, by 2012, the academy’s Burlington Gardens annex: build a lecture theater, refurbish the upstairs gallery spaces, and open a ground-floor restaurant.
Saumarez Smith, 54, is steering an institution that for three decades was dominated by former Exhibitions Secretary Norman Rosenthal, mastermind of such blockbusters as this year’s “From Russia”, “Aztecs” (2002-3) and “Sensation” (1997). Rosenthal left in January to become a freelance curator; the RA exhibitions program for the next four years is mostly his doing. In the spring of 2009, the RA will show the work of the 19th- century Japanese printmaker Utagawa Kuniyoshi.
The new boss’s aim is to showcase the 240-year-old RA’s other constituents: the 80 artists, or academicians, who govern it, collectively displaying their work at the annual Summer Exhibition; and the art school, Britain’s oldest, where William Blake and J.M.W. Turner studied. He is glad that Kapoor and Chipperfield, both academicians, are in the RA spotlight. (Bloomberg)