Louisville Magazine

MAY 2014

Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.

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3 6 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.14 Top left: Anish Kapoor, Untitled Yellow Wall Disk (year unknown) "A great story about relationships and serendipity involves a work I am most grateful to have: the Anish Kapoor sculpture. Shortly before coming to work for the Speed Art Mu- seum, Julien Robson contacted me from the Art Basel (in Miami), where, at the Lisson Gallery booth, he had seen four Kapoors. He met with me in London, and we made an appointment with Nicholas Logsdail (from Lisson), saying we had come to see the Kapoors. Logsdail said, 'Kapoors? There's only one.' "The ones we had hoped to see were blue, red and maybe purple — we wanted blue, of course — but instead we were shown a huge chrome-yellow disc. Looking at it at dusk in a weird light, with Nicholas shining an electric light bulb on it, you couldn't really see it very well, but I thought, 'OK, let's do it,' and bought it. It's an example of getting something that was not what I frst had in mind, but which turned out to be better. "As you get close to the Kapoor you become disoriented, and you start moving your fnger toward the center of the work. Because yellow is the color that keeps approach- ing you — blue is the color that recedes — it changes your whole idea of how far you are from the disc. It changes your perception, including your voice. It has become maybe my favorite piece in the collection because it involves interaction with the viewer. We all have givens about what we think things are. One of the functions of an artist is to show you that what you thought was reality is not necessarily that." — Shands, in Great Meadows Opposite page, on wall above staircase: Elizabeth Murray, Descending Heel (1988) "The artist had seen her father at a time when he was looking for a job and noticed that he had a hole in his shoe. What I fnd amazing in this very abstract work is that you can see that there is this humanism to the fgure that is very much a part of the artist's intention." Opposite page, white sculpture on foor: Javier Perez, Cumulo (2001) "When I bought this piece I had no idea who the artist was; I only knew that I liked it. I realized after some contemplation that it had to do with materials and texture. I had never seen anything quite so elegant. It can be a cloud, a caulifower, a geode. It is a purely natural form in acrylic, and it glows from the inside and changes with the light of the day. It is like people that you are attracted to — you don't know why; you just are." Above and opposite page, bust: Robert Arneson, Ecstasy of a Mud Stomper (1983) "I bought this piece in his studio. He was a breakthrough person for ceramics and sculpture. He did self-portraits and always painted himself as part of the joke. When I bought this work, he was diagnosed with cancer, and that is when he took off the mask, and this work is the person who was behind that mask." Lower left, foreground: Richard Deacon, Before My Very Eyes #1 (1989) "This piece started the scale of what we were collecting. We saw it in Chicago and were not sure if the scale would look too big or even, perhaps, not big enough. We had it sent down and we were going to live with it for a day, as a trial run, and then send it back. As I began to live with it I realized that Deacon is part of that group of sculptors that came after the great Henry Moore, only they were using very common materials. It felt so considered and so fnished, but it took me a long time to see the echoes of so many sculptures that had come before it. I had to get past the simple materials to get to the beauty and the heart of the work." Lower left and above, far wall: Johnathan Borofsky, 2,841,780 Painting With Hand Shadow (1983) "I knew that I needed something that had a large scale and felt that the room needed some punctuation. I had followed Borofsky's career for many years and found myself attracted to his drawings, and then suddenly there is this painting that has been blown up to these massive proportions! It felt completely apocalyptical! Painted on the back of the canvas is Borofsky's handprint, and it is lit in such a way that you can feel the artist pushing out and breaking out of the frame, redefning a line between painting and sculpture. That is the way I want life to be: unconventional and astounding!" 32-37 Al Shands.indd 36 4/21/14 11:30 AM

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