Anish Kapoor is watching an assistant stick tiny trees on an architectural maquette with hairspray.
“Are you sure you’re doing the right thing?” the sculptor asks. “It’s just the wrong smell for this”.
Kapoor, 54, is setting up an exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, “Place/No Place: Anish Kapoor in Architecture” (through Nov. 8). There are cavities, concavities, spheres and funnels everywhere, representing works made, in the making, or never made.
The models include Chicago’s stainless-steel “Cloud Gate” sculpture - nicknamed “The Bean” - and the huge, double- ended horn shown at Tate Modern in 2002-3 (”Marsyas”).
Indian-born Kapoor smiles at me amiably. The sleeves of his dressy white shirt are rolled up, and he keeps a close eye on his crew, even when interviewed.
Kapoor keeps busy. He has a show at Berlin’s Deutsche Guggenheim next month (Nov. 30 to Feb. 1), and another in 2009 at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, which won’t be a retrospective. (”I’m still around and working”, he says.) In 2011, he will fill Paris’s 19th-century Grand Palais as Richard Serra and Anselm Kiefer did. “That’s a hard one, let me tell you”,  he says. (Bloomberg)

The American sculptor Richard Serra, who will be 70 next year, has been wrestling with steel since he was 17. In those days, he was working in the steel mills of California, his home state. When he began to produce work of his own, he was classified as a minimalist. Not any more. As the years have gone by, Serra’s brutishly engaging steel sculptures have grown bigger and bigger.
The three large pieces that stand at the centre of his new show at the vast Gagosian Gallery in London must have been as easy to shift into their present locations as rusting steamships. Once, a man died when a Serra fell on him. The shapes of the first two bring together the idea of the doughnut and the idea of the sphere – the gallery list describes this as a pair of “torqued toruses”. But we don’t need to go into the intricacy of their making to feel some response to these works in our pulses. A child will respond, and immediately, with shock, awe and delight, to what Serra is doing. They look a little like giant, ferociously dangerous, vertigo-inducing, splayed-lipped cauldrons.
Walk inside – yes, much of the pleasure resides in the fact that you can enter Serra’s works and wander at your will – and you see that these vast, soaring, enclosing walls of gently oxidising Corten steel (today they look a warm and almost furry, if not velvety, terracotta-ish brown) are leaving oval shapes on the ground. But it is those walls themselves, smooth enough, but also mysteriously streaked and stained, that are so enthralling and disturbing in just about equal measure.
The walls practically scrape the ceiling of this gallery – you almost feel you can see the scratch marks where they didn’t quite make it, as sweating gangs of labouring men heaved and strained them into place. But how exactly – in what particular direction – are they listing and leaning? The fact is that we are never quite sure, because our perception of these shapes seems to change as we walk around and through them. (The Independent)

This September, Moscow is the place to be. Two exclusive openings will turn Russia’s capital. The first, held on the 16th, is the already internationally famous Dasha Zhukova’s Garage for Contemporary Culture, with an Ilya and Emilia Kabakov Moscow Retrospective. Then, just a day of rest to get ready for Gagosian, whose new muscovite exhibition is opening on September 18th in a place with a remarkable name: “Red October”. Conceived by Victoria Gelfand and Sam Orlofsky, the exhibition “For what you are about to receive” will feature a list of contemporary art masters such as Cy Twombly, Willem De Kooning, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakani, Ed Ruscha and Richard Serra.

New York, NY – Christie’s New York leads its fall season with the eighth edition of First Open on September 9, which includes over 230 lots of Post-War & Contemporary Art and is expected to realize in excess of $6-8 million. First Open displays another stunning array of works for this highly anticipated and successful sale. Highlights of the sale include an exciting assortment of paintings, sculpture, drawings and photographs from both well-known and emerging artists. With estimates ranging from $1,500 to $500,000, First Open is an exceptional opportunity to acquire works at a variety of price points, whether you are building an existing collection or starting anew.

Title: Installations: Selections from the Guggenheim Collections
Location: BILBAO - Guggenheim Museum
Start Date: 2008-04-29
End Date: 2009-01-11

One of the major developments of recent art history, installation art came to prominence in the early 1990s as a mode of art production centered on the creation of an immersive physical experience. Looking back to the pioneering Happenings of the 1950s, as well as Minimalist and Post-Minimalist artists like Richard Serra, who highlighted bodily awareness through sculptural interventions, artists in the 1990s expanded the work of art into a multimedia environment.