PORTO.- On July 6, 2018, The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art will present the Great Annual Exhibition in the Park, a major exhibition of works by Anish Kapoor (Bombay, India, 1954), one of the world’s leading contemporary artists. The exhibition, organised with the collaboration of the "la Caixa" Foundation, will initially feature four large-scale works distributed around Serralves Park, accompanied by presentation in Serralves Museum of 70 architectural models and a sculpture, conceived over the last forty years.

Curated by Suzanne Cotter, this will be the first solo exhibition in Portugal dedicated to the oeuvre of Anish Kapoor.

From works such as Sky Mirror to the dramatic carving of the landscape itself, Kapoor's oeuvre acquires the mythical qualities and symbolic relations of the landscape. By uniting the earth and the sky, the horizon and the dark interior, his sculptures cross borders and change meanings. Their form - or lack of form - place them in a state of mobile and liminal transformation. We cannot understand Kapoor's sculptures without experiencing them.

In this exhibition, presented in various parts of Serralves Park, the artist will show recently conceived sculptures, some of which have never been seen before, such as Bird Caller, which present the iconic languages of forms and materials that have made him famous.

In dialogue with the works displayed in the Park there will be an exhibition in the Museum of his scale models. Produced for works and ideas at an architectural scale, producing scale models as an instrument for thinking about form and scale has always played a central role in Kapoor's studio work. They present emerging ideas about space to which he repeatedly returns, and reveal the importance of experimentation and process as means of achieving transformation.

Born in Bombay and based in London, Kapoor first rose to international recognition in the 1980s as a member of the generation of new British sculptors. Since then, he has developed a work that stands out due to its tremendous diversity and ambition, embracing both the intimacy of uncertain objects in the interior space, as well as the monumental scale of the urban and rural landscape. His best-known public works and commissions include Cloud Gate (2004), produced for Millennium Park, Chicago, Marsyas, produced for the Tate Turbine Hall, London, in 2002, Leviathan, created in 2011 for the Grand Palais in Paris, Orbit produced for the Queen Elizabeth Park, London, during the 2012 Olympic Games, and the exhibition conceived for the gardens of the Palace of Versailles in 2015.

The 18-hectare Serralves Park will be the privileged stage for presentation of Kapoor’s sculptures. It offers a diversity of harmoniously interconnected spaces including formal gardens, woods and a traditional farm. Designed in the 1930s by the well-known French architect Jacques Gréber, the gardens are a unique reference in Portugal’s landscape heritage. In 1997, Serralves Park received the Henry Ford Prize for Preservation of the Environment and more recently, in 2012, (together with Serralves Museum designed by Álvaro Siza and the Art Deco Serralves Villa) it was classified by the Portuguese government as a National Monument. In 2015, the publisher Phaidon included Serralves Gardens in the book, The Gardener's Garden, a selection of the world's 250 most remarkable gardens, selected by an international panel of experts from around the world.