October 2026
Anish Kapoor Presents Earth Sky on Red Ground, a Solo Exhibition Focusing on His Painting Practice at SCAD Museum of Art
Earth Sky on Red Ground, a solo exhibition by internationally renowned contemporary artist Anish Kapoor was on view at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. Bringing together 15 paintings made between 2012 and 2022, the exhibition marks the first presentation at a U.S. museum to focus exclusively on Kapoor’s painting practice. The exhibition offered an in-depth look at the role painting has played within the artist’s broader oeuvre, best known for sculpture and large-scale installation.
For Kapoor, painting is not a distinct practice separate from sculpture, but rather another field that takes the shape of his long-standing sculptural exploration into matter and immateriality, presence and absence, and the interior and exterior of the body. The works in the exhibition were characterized by abstract forms that fill expansive canvases, thickly layered oil paint, and bold, gestural brushwork. Among the presented works, Combusted Self (2020), measuring approximately 2.4 by 3 meters, demonstrates Kapoor’s distinctive approach to painting, in which the materiality of densely built-up paint allows the medium to extend beyond the two-dimensional surface into a physical and spatial experience. These painterly explorations further reveal how Kapoor’s interest in the relationship between space, matter, the body, and perception—central to his sculptural and installation practices—continues to unfold through painting.
The exhibition proposed viewers to consider painting not as a peripheral aspect of Kapoor’s sculptural practice, but as a central medium that runs throughout his oeuvre. His enduring engagement with materials including mirrors, pigments, stone, and wax, through which he disrupts perception and probes the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, takes on a new form on canvas through color, the materiality of paint, abstract forms, and gesture. In doing so, Earth Sky on Red Ground reveals how Kapoor’s sculpture and painting, while distinct in medium, form a continuous and interconnected body of work.
For Kapoor, painting is not a distinct practice separate from sculpture, but rather another field that takes the shape of his long-standing sculptural exploration into matter and immateriality, presence and absence, and the interior and exterior of the body. The works in the exhibition were characterized by abstract forms that fill expansive canvases, thickly layered oil paint, and bold, gestural brushwork. Among the presented works, Combusted Self (2020), measuring approximately 2.4 by 3 meters, demonstrates Kapoor’s distinctive approach to painting, in which the materiality of densely built-up paint allows the medium to extend beyond the two-dimensional surface into a physical and spatial experience. These painterly explorations further reveal how Kapoor’s interest in the relationship between space, matter, the body, and perception—central to his sculptural and installation practices—continues to unfold through painting.
The exhibition proposed viewers to consider painting not as a peripheral aspect of Kapoor’s sculptural practice, but as a central medium that runs throughout his oeuvre. His enduring engagement with materials including mirrors, pigments, stone, and wax, through which he disrupts perception and probes the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, takes on a new form on canvas through color, the materiality of paint, abstract forms, and gesture. In doing so, Earth Sky on Red Ground reveals how Kapoor’s sculpture and painting, while distinct in medium, form a continuous and interconnected body of work.
