The construction on Grainger Plaza in Millennium Park that effectively cut off access to the sculpture was for necessary maintenance, including rebuilding the plaza podium, replacing pavers, and making accessibility upgrades such as new stairs and ramps, as well as a new waterproofing system. Cloud Gate has been closed since last August and was expected to open earlier this spring.

“Weather-permitting, we expect to reopen the Plaza to the public before the end of the month,” a spokesperson with Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events told local news outlet WGN.

At 33 feet high, 42 feet wide, and 66 feet long, Cloud Gate (2006) is one of world’s largest public art installations and the top-ranked tourist attraction in the Midwest. The $23 million sculpture comprises 168 stainless steel plates welded together and polished to a mirror finish, making it extremely popular for selfies and other photographs.

Last year, Kapoor debuted a “Mini Bean” sculpture in New York to mixed reviews. The 19-foot-high, 40-ton sculpture was estimated to have cost between $8 to $10 million.

The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events posted an alert on its website about construction on Grainger Plaza that started this week, limiting public access and views of Cloud Gate, more often known as the Bean, until spring 2024.

“This necessary maintenance by the City of Chicago will replace pavers and make other repairs and accessibility upgrades to the Plaza—to enhance the nearly 20-year-old Park’s appearance, visitor experience, and position as the #1 attraction in the Midwest,” the department wrote.

Cloud Gate (2006) is 33 feet high, 42 feet wide, and 66 feet long, making it one of world’s largest public art installations. The $23 million sculpture is comprised of 168 stainless steel plates welded together and then polished to a mirror finish, making it extremely popular for selfies and other photographs.

In 2017, the British-Indian artist told ARTnews about his complicated feelings about the sculpture’s popularity and its ability to incite strong opinions.

“When I first did Cloud Gate in Chicago, I saw those pictures of hundreds of people around the piece and I thought, ‘Oh God, what have I done? Is this Disneyland?'” he said. “So I decided to go to Chicago to try to understand what’s really going on there. It didn’t take me long to understand that actually there is something mysterious about that object, and its mystery is to do with its scale. And that comes down to just one simple fact: it has no joints.”

Cloud Gate has also been a featured location for several television shows and movies, including Chicago Med, The Break-Up, Source Code, The Vow, The Beast, and the fourth installment of the film franchise “Transformers.”

The popularity of Cloud Gate has led Kapoor to accuse the Chinese city of Karamay of plagiarism in 2015 and to sue the National Rifle Association of America for copyright infringement after the group included an image of the sculpture in two videos. There is now a smaller version by the artist that finally opened earlier this year at the base of a luxury residential tower in Manhattan after years of delays.

The New Yorker once termed the sculpture, which is not yet titled, “the mini-Bean,” a reference to the nickname given to Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, the work this piece is loosely based on. That Chicago sculpture, which debuted in 2006, is well-loved, both by locals and tourists, and its following may explain why this new Kapoor work has already attracted so many influencers and curious onlookers.

Yet this sculpture is no Cloud Gate, and personally, I wouldn’t mind if the building above it made good on its promise and crushed the thing altogether. Kapoor’s latest is a big, shiny, reflective object that feels like the final boss of ugly public art in New York—not that that will stop people from flocking to it.

In some ways, it feels like a mistake to call Kapoor’s sculpture public art, however, since the structure above it is about as private as it gets. Designed by the starchitect firm Herzog & de Meuron, the building, known as the Jenga Tower, contains 60 stories of luxury condominiums, some of which even overlook the mini-Bean. (Kapoor bought one of those units for more than $13.5 million.) The tower rises so high, you can’t see its uppermost floors from the street, but if you were in an airplane, you’d notice that portions of them jut out like unevenly laid blocks.

This new sculpture, which may have cost as much as $10 million to fabricate, had always been a part of the building plan, appearing in reporting on the Herzog & de Meuron building as early as 2008. (The building itself was completed more than five years ago.) Manufacturing difficulties and the pandemic caused the piece’s years-long delay, and for a while, the mini-Bean existed only as a partially empty shell New Yorkers could see from the street. In 2021 Curbed New York made a plea for the piece to remain that way, arguing that Chicago’s Bean should be allowed to retain its glory, but alas, that was not to be.

Much has been made of this new work’s technical qualities—a typical focal point when discussing Kapoor’s art, which has previously included a permanently churning whirlpool and pieces made from the world’s blackest black. There’s little to fawn over with this new mini-Bean, however, which is nowhere near as elegantly fashioned as the rest of Kapoor’s work.

Cloud Gate was fabricated from enormous steel plates that are welded seamlessly together, making the sculpture appear endless and smooth, even otherworldly. With the mini-Bean, however, the edges of some of the plates are nakedly visible. A close look reveals several long, thin slits running across the piece; only from afar do they disappear, making the sculpture come off as the tacky fast-fashion cousin of its couture Chicago counterpart.

In renderings, this new Kapoor sculpture gleams like a freshly buffed car. In reality, it’s a lot less exciting. The steel plates are already flecked with water stains (will they survive a winter blizzard or a summer downpour?), and on a recent afternoon, I watched as a small group of workers studied how best to squeegee the sculpture to keep it clean. One of them got to work, then let the soap dry, only to find, minutes later, that the suds hadn’t left the work spotless after all.

The technical fetishism even extends to the area around the mini-Bean. According to the Tribeca Citizen, the sculpture is “suspended with a system of cables and spring members so that it will be able to move slightly with changes of temperature and wind and snow loads.” Yet the other day, as frigid gusts blew past, Kapoor’s sculpture hardly budged in a noticeable way.

On Thursday, portions of the mini-Bean were barricaded, possibly so that troublemakers can’t slip under or around it and get into its crevices. These blockades were makeshift—they seem to be crafted from plastic construction materials crudely placed around it—and they accidentally interrupt the glossiness Kapoor meant to evoke. It’s not clear whether they’ll be there permanently. Regardless, the niche that shelters the mini-Bean provides viewers less access than those who visit Cloud Gate, which stands free for visitors to circumambulate as they please.

I must give Kapoor this: his mini-Bean does mess with the mind a little. Standing before it, staring at the distorted images of Tribeca stretching across its surface, I began to wonder if the sidewalk below was caving a little, buckling beneath its weight. He’s crafted something that seems to suck in its surroundings and spit them back out, warped and stranger than they once were.

But no one I observed seemed much interested in any of that. A man filmed himself walking up to the sculpture, muttering something as he did so, then played back the footage and, seemingly unsatisfied with it, shot it all over again. A child rolled over on a scooter, nearly put his face to the sculpture, and then stepped back, perhaps afraid of how cold the mini-Bean would be to the touch. Wielding a selfie stick, a woman stood with her back to the sculpture and went on a photo-shooting spree. Two people mugged for each other’s cameras, switching positions constantly in an attempt to get the best angle. A mass of tourists herded before the piece, briefly blocking foot traffic and irking the selfie taker.

None of these people, it seemed, were there to admire the mini-Bean. They were there mainly to see themselves reflected in it.

But who really gets a complete view of the mini-Bean, anyway? It’s not the people on the street, who must genuflect before this monstrosity that looms over them, but the residents of the Jenga Tower, who can step out onto their pristine balconies and gaze down, like royalty making an appearance before the masses. Whatever these residents may see in the mini-Bean from this perspective remains a mystery because almost no one who passes before Kapoor’s sculpture will be able to visit these apartments.

And then there’s another curious detail that the people viewing the mini-Bean seemed not to notice: a security camera mounted on the overhang above. Someone, somewhere, could see every inch of the mini-Bean—even behind its barricades—while almost everyone else was given a partial view that left them stranded on the corner of Leonard and Church Street.

There’s something far more insidious about the mini-Bean than initially meets the eye. The sculpture reminded me of what art historian Anna Chave, in a famed essay from 1990, once termed Minimalism’s “valorization of power,” the potentially dangerous choice to wield influence over viewers by way of big, beautiful, spare objects. No, Kapoor is not a Minimalist—his work is far less severe than that of Richard Serra, Donald Judd, or others associated with that movement. He does, however, seem to thrive on the idea that most should feel dominated by his art and that those who paid for it should feel mightier than the rest.

The mini-Bean earns the name the New Yorker gave it; it is indeed mini, being 12 feet shorter than its Chicago counterpart. Yet looking into its mirrored surfaces, it still feels grand and discomfiting, even in some ways dangerous. While the sculpture may be positioned in such a way that it appears to be ceding victory to the skyscraper, it’s actually viewers who are losing the battle to the building and Kapoor’s statement piece. We shouldn’t be so willing to give up that easily.

The 19-foot-high, 40-ton “mini-Bean,” estimated to cost $8 million to $10 million, sits at 56 Leonard Street in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan. It is carefully wedged into the luxury tower’s exterior so that only residents can view all its sides. The condo, known as Jenga, was designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Kapoor himself bought a four-bedroom apartment there for $13.5 million in 2016.

News of the sculpture’s opening was first reported by Curbed, New York Magazine’s real estate and urban design website.

Work began on the new mirror-finish Kapoor sculpture more than four years ago, but the process was delayed by construction issues and Covid-19 travel restrictions.

An email from the fabricator, Performance Structures, Inc., to the developer, Alexico Group, in 2018 explained the complexity of the high-profile project and how it differed from Cloud Gate. It required 38 precision-formed stainless-steel plates and a custom supporting framework, all precisely welded together, sanded, and polished “so that when all were assembled the results would create a perfect sculptural form.”

“When completed, the entire sculpture will be suspended with a system of cables and spring members so that it will be able to move slightly with changes of temperature and wind and snow loads,” said the email, obtained by Tribeca Citizen.

A temporary ban on foreign visitors during the pandemic also prevented Kapoor’s specialized installation staff from entering the United States. Additional complications included shipping delays on the sculpture’s parts; a hot, exposed side of the piece expanding to the point of rupture; and the British construction staff being limited to three-month work periods.

While Kapoor’s sculpture at 56 Leonard Street is finally up for public viewing, it still lacks an official name. A naming ceremony is scheduled for the spring.

Georg Baselitz has brought a dozen bright new paintings (and a few dark, deathly sculptures) to the grand Museo di Palazzo Grimani. Sterling Ruby has a wily, understated sculpture on the facade of a palazzo being renovated by Berggruen Arts & Culture. Anselm Kiefer has installed gargantuan new pieces inside the sumptuous Palazzo Ducale.

And Anish Kapoor, never one to be outdone, has a doubleheader curated by Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbits, with many tons of his art on view at the Gallerie dell’Accademia and the Palazzo Manfrin, a formidable 18th-century building that the artist is turning into a cultural hub called the Manfrin Project.

Recent paintings by Anish Kapoor at the Palazzo Manfrin.

In the run-up to his two-part show, Kapoor grabbed headlines by saying that he would display works made with Vantablack, the intensely black material that he secured the exclusive rights to use in art (generating a noisy controversy). In one example in the Accademia, he has affixed it to a wall in the shape of a tall, thin oval. It absorbs nearly all of the light that hits it, and becomes a bottomless abyss that the eye tries to penetrate and fails. It enchants for a moment, and then registers as kind of a gimcrack trick, with none of the beguiling splendor that radiates from Kapoor’s most successful work. Maybe he should let other artists try out the stuff.

With his zest for dramatic scale, his love for high drama, and his towering ambitions, Kapoor has become one of our era’s greatest crowdpleasers, a genuine popular success. No shame should attach to that. His brain-scrambling Cloud Gate (2004–06) in Chicago, lovingly called “The Bean,” is a masterpiece—the rare delightful artwork that has managed to become a city landmark. I do not trust anyone who claims to dislike it.

But Kapoor’s penchant for aesthetic grandiosity has also made him easy to pigeonhole as a purveyor of increasingly empty, overwrought spectacles. Many of the works in Venice fall into that category.

Anish Kapoor’s Symphony for a Beloved Sun (2013) at the Palazzo Manfrin.

At the Accademia, a specially made cannon has blasted heavy balls of deep-red wax all over a room, turning it into a battlefield of blood, a Chaïm Soutine carcass exploded across white walls. (Its title is also not subtle: Shooting into the Corner, 2008/09.) At the Palazzo Manfrin, similar stuff litters the floor of an expansive space, apparently dropped from the two tall conveyor belts, for Symphony for a Beloved Sun (2013). A gigantic red tondo stands above it all, silent and imperious. This is art that aims to dominate, that will take no questions and brook no dissent. It is dread-inducing, but also fascinating in its absolute disregard for your presence.

Elsewhere, huge hunks of metal are covered with more bloodied, organ-like forms, and large, rough recent paintings bear black patches that suggest bodily orifices. (The less said about them the better.) The show is portrait of an artist who should be encouraged to be more selective in what he unleashes on the world.

Anish Kapoor’s White Sand, Red Millet, Many Flowers (1982) at the Palazzo Manfrin.

Mercifully, there are also a few superb early works in the mix. One is White Sand, Red Millet, Many Flowers, from 1982. It is composed of what to be appear four small, intricate beachside sandcastles made from pigment. Somehow, they are standing, and they are immaculate. (A wall label reveals that wood and cement are involved.) They are faintly miraculous, and as you walk by them, trying to understand how they work, you may find yourself moving more slowly: It looks like a breeze could knock them over! You want them to be safe. In contrast, much of Kapoor’s newer work just seems to want you dead.

All around the city, there will be other art shows of all sorts. Some are sanctioned by the Biennale and termed Collateral Events, while others are simply being brought to Venice independently by their organizers. The shows run the gamut from surveys for some of today’s most important artists to grand events at which particularly major projects will be debuted.

It’s worth remembering that some shows on in Venice this time are essentially gussied-up sponsored content—galleries will underwrite their artists’ shows, which are sometimes staged at key institutions throughout the city and even done under the supervision of beloved art historians and curators. Because of this, the exhibitions vary dramatically in quality, and it can be difficult to sort through them to know which ones are actually worth seeing.

In an effort to make that all a bit easier for you, ARTnews has assembled a list of 10 essential non-Biennale exhibitions to put on your radar while in Venice. When relevant, we’ve noted when a show received funding from a gallery representing the artist or artists being addressed.

Back in 2013, Moore worked with Kapoor, Damien Hirst, David Bailey and others for a charity project called Art Wars, for which artists applied their signature styles to Stormtrooper helmets. Last week, Moore launched a new initiative, also called Art Wars, that sold pictures of the works made for the 2013 project as NFTs. According to Financial Times, more than $6 million has traded hands for the 1,138 available NFTs to date.

Some of the artists involved are now pursuing legal action against Art Wars. (Hirst’s Art Wars Stormtrooper helmet was not included in the NFT sale, however.) Because of the involvement of big-name artists like Kapoor and David Bailey, this case will be closely watched by those in the NFT space, since its outcome may decide who owns the rights to images of an artwork when it comes to minting NFTs.

Last week, the team behind Art Wars NFTs seemed to take the matter somewhat cavalierly when it tweeted, “In any project with over 80 artists, there are bound to be some issues, all artists were contacted before the mint and the project was explained.” The thread of tweets continued to explain that the images were taken by Art Wars photographers, among them Moore’s friend Bran Symondson.

In follow-up tweets, Art Wars said it retains the IP rights of the pieces themselves, and that it had exhibited these pieces and toured with them for years. It’s unclear if the pieces were donated by the artists. When Art Wars was formed in 2013, it was done as a collaboration with Missing People, a British organization which supports those whose loved ones are missing. The Art Wars NFT project does not appear to have a charity aspect to it.

“Ben [Moore] is dealing with this, this is no one’s fault just simple admin to be done by the boss,” another Art Wars tweet assured. Moore did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

After receiving a copyright infringement notice, OpenSea, the online platform on which Art Wars NFTs were traded, shut down the Art Wars page yesterday so no further trading can take place. According to the Financial Times, 12 artists are currently considering taking further legal action.

Kapoor will debut works made via nanotechnology in 2022 in a two-part presentation spread across the Gallerie dell’Accademia and the Palazzo Manfrin in Venice, Italy, both of which are better known for mounting presentations of Renaissance art and Old Masters works. The shows will open on April 20, 2022, just a few days before the Venice Biennale begins welcoming the public.

What Kapoor is doing with nanotechnology isn’t totally clear, though the Gallerie dell’Accademia said that the artist plans to enlist carbon atoms. It also appears that he views these new works as being in dialogue with art of the past.

“It is a huge honor to be invited to engage with the collections at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice; perhaps one of the finest collections of classical painting anywhere in the world,” Kapoor said in a statement. “All art must engage with what went before.”

The Gallerie dell’Accademia, which organized the show, brought in big talent to organize the exhibition of these epic works: Taco Dibbits, the director of the Amerstdam’s Rijksmuseum. In a statement, Dibbits said that Kapoor’s latest sculptures “promise to be a revelation.”

Kapoor is no stranger to Venice. Back in 1990, Kapoor represented Britain at the Venice Biennale with 16 hulking sandstone blocks as well as sculptures made using powdered blue pigment that were intended substances used in religious ceremonies in India, the country where he was born. (One of those sculptures is now in the collection of the Tate.) For his work, Kapoor won the Premio Duemila, an award given to artists younger than 35. The choice provoked controversy because Kapoor was 36 at the time.

He’s also appeared in group shows at the Venice Biennale: once in 1982, in the “Aperto” section for emerging artists, and another time in 1993, when his work was shown at the Italian Pavilion alongside art by Francesco Clemente, Luciano Fabri, and Fabio Mauri.

Now 67 and one of the most influential sculptors of his generation, whose most prized works fetch millions at auction, Kapoor is probably best known in the United States for Chicago’s shimmering and sensually curvaceous Cloud Gate (2004), which is more commonly called “The Bean” due to its unmistakable bean-like shape. Some of his other seminal works include Sky Mirror (2006), Descension (2014), and the eerie tunnel-like epic Dirty Corner (2011) that’s installed in the manicured gardens at the Palace of Versailles, and which has several times been defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti.

The super-size success of the conceptual artist, married for the last handful of years to landscape designer Sophie Walker, allows him to own some spectacular homes around the globe, and his base in Central London, a bespoke mansion that overlooks Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the ancient Holborn district, has now come to market at £19 million, estimated at almost $26 million.

[Anish Kapoor to Convert 18th-Century Venetian Palazzo into Exhibition Space]

Interior view of Anish Kapoor’s former residence in London, England.

Originally built as two separate residences, the unfussy and mostly unadorned brown brick-buildings were joined in the early 1800s, according to listings held by Nick Verdi of Savills. As reported by the listings website Mansion Global, Kapoor purchased the property in 2009 for about £3.6 million, or roughly $5 million. He soon engaged the acclaimed services of David Chipperfield Architects to convert what was then a down-on-its-heels five-story warren of offices into a substantial, showstopper single-family home.

At that time, an elevator was installed in a small addition at the rear of the house, and the top floor living spaces reconfigured to create a roof terrace. Ornate period details were carefully uncovered and preserved to mix freely with a decidedly modern, almost minimalist aesthetic throughout the residence that promo materials tout as “one of the largest homes in Central London.”

A quick scan over the floor plan shows there are at least a dozen fireplaces, some with antique mantelpieces and a few finished in an austerely contemporary fashion, and eight very sparely and colorfully furnished reception rooms that showcase a small number of artworks.

There are five ample reception rooms, plus a more cozily proportioned den arranged around an atrium-style stair gallery on the ground floor. Two more reception rooms on the second floor are joined by a bookshelf-lined study, another small den, a 25-foot-long dining room, and a sleek kitchen arranged around two large center islands wrapped in strongly veined chocolate-brown marble.

Interior view of Anish Kapoor’s former residence in London, England.

The residence’s four principal bedrooms, each with at least one fireplace and all with a private bath, include a principal suite that encompasses the entire top floor.

Interior view of Anish Kapoor’s former residence in London, England.

The massive suite comprises a 42-foot-long bedroom/sitting room, a skylight-topped dressing room, and two massive bathrooms, one of them featuring a Japanese-style wooden soaking tub set against a wall of glass that looks out to a lush, densely planted roof garden designed by Walker.

Kapoor has previously raised concerns about the state of Venice as a city. This past June, Kapoor and 21 other artists signed a letter urging Venetian officials to consider the negative impacts of tourism on the city.

The Palazzo Marin will host rotating exhibitions in a ground-floor gallery. Its second and third floors will display works from the foundation’s collection, and there will also be room for an archive and a workshop intended to support artists and scholars working in the fields of history, technology, and art.

Palazzo Manfrin was built in the 1500s for the aristocratic Priuli family. The Venetian palazzo was reconstructed during the 1720s, and was further modified in the late 1780s.

Until recent years, the building served as a school and has since fallen into disrepair. Kapoor tapped the architecture firms FWR Associati and UNA studio, based in Venice and Hamburg, respectively, to spearhead this major project.

The Art Newspaper reported that Kapoor’s foundation is expected to open at the Palazzo Manfrin in 2023. But it is not the only forthcoming Kapoor project headed to the city, however. In 2022, the Gallerie dell’Accademia will host a major exhibition of Kapoor’s sculptures coated in Vantablack, which is believed to be the darkest shade of black in the world.