NANTES, FRANCE.- The Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes is taking part in the Estuaire Nantes -Saint Nazaire 2007 project, running throughout the summer from 1 June to 1 September. To mark the occasion, Anish Kapoor has been invited to create a work especially for the Museum. Anish Kapoor has chosen to show Svayambh, a monumental installation extending across the entire ground floor. This new work comprises a gigantic block of red wax transported by a flatcar that gradually crosses the exhibition space on rails set 150 centimetres above the floor. Cumbrously the flatcar makes its way through the too-narrow arches of the patio, leaving dramatic strips of its wax cargo on the pillars in a painful but inexorable advance that can be read as a magnificent allegory of memory and history – two themes central to the museum's functioning. The fifteen tons of red matter that are little by little worn away by the arches speak to us of the suffering of human beings caught up in the mysterious workings of destiny.

Staying true to his interest in forms produced by forces or stresses that modify an object's shape, the artist offers a work generated by the architecture of the space. Whence the title Svayambh, a Sanskrit word whose literal meaning – something like "self-engendered, shaped by one's own energy" – hints at the cosmic connotations underpinning the work of an artist whose current explorations also focus in part on the representation of the original explosion. From 12 October–13 January this deeply metaphysical sculpture will be on show at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Anish Kapoor's oeuvre is indisputably one of the landmarks of the sculpture of the last twenty years. Making its appearance in the context of the new English sculpture in the early 1980s, it at once stood out as dissenting from that of such major sculptors of the same generation as Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon. Where their work is characterized by the use of materials typical of the late industrial period, Kapoor's has a timeless look that seems to owe its existence to inner processes of maturation. His very first sculptures made his reputation with their bright coatings of pigment and the intense spirituality they seemed to radiate; since then he has been undertaking astonishingly monumental projects to which, in terms of ambition and sheer physical effect, we can only compare the achievements of such American sculptors of the '70s as Richard Serra and Michael Heizer. He recently elaborated on an already singular vocabulary in the gigantic Marsyas, presented in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London: a work whose dimensions (45 x 30 x 150 metres), tragic lyricism and plastic innovation left Europe stunned.

Born in Bombay in 1954, Anish Kapoor now lives and works in London. After training at the Chelsea School of Art & Design in 1977–78, he began his career in the early 80’s with an exhibition in Paris and followed up with a host of solo and group shows that brought him international renown. He was awarded the Premio Duemila at the 1990 Venice Biennale, then the Turner Prize in 1991. He was given an Honorary Fellowship at the London Institute in 1997 and was named Commander of the British Empire en 2003. His work has been acquired by major public and private collections including the Tate Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Pays de la Loire Regional Contemporary Art Collection. Anish Kapoor has shown regularly in France: in Tournus in 1985, Normandy in 1988, Grenoble in 1990–91, Bordeaux in 1998, Avignon in 2000, Paris in 2002 and Toulouse in 2006.

The catalogue - The 72-page catalogue that accompanies the exhibition covers the history of the work on show from its beginnings through the spectacular process of its making, and points up its relationship with the artist's oeuvre as a whole. With over 80 photographs, the catalogue also includes an essay by art theoretician Olivier Schefer and an interview with Anish Kapoor by philosopher Gilles Tieberghien. The catalogue is published by Fage. Price: 20 euros. This exhibition has been organised with the backing of Gaz de France and the Société Générale bank.