Artist comes up with a whale of an idea

Leviathan can only be contemplated from outside after seeing it from within. Photo / AP

Monumental? You asked for monumental? The British sculptor Anish Kapoor yesterday became the fourth artist to meet the challenge of occupying all 13,500sq m of the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris with a single work of art.

Kapoor's offering - an immense, high-tech Zeppelin, or child's balloon, with four brown-maroon PVC blobs, 90m long and 45m high - left the Parisian art world breathless. Some of the least easily impressed art critics of the planet applauded and shouted "Bravo!" and "Merci!" when Kapoor unveiled, and explained, his Leviathan.

The word comes from the Bible, where it is applied to the sea-monster which swallowed Jonah. Kapoor's Leviathan offers an opportunity to discover how it might have felt to live "inside the whale". Visitors to the exhibition - from today until June 23 - will be ushered through a revolving door into the echoing calm and ethereal flesh-coloured light inside the largest of the four blobs. Only after they have experienced the work from the inside will they be encouraged to gape at the immensity of its exterior (as long as a football pitch). Leviathan was also the name of a celebrated 17th-century book by Thomas Hobbes about political freedoms, and the dangers of an over-powerful state.

Kapoor, 57, yesterday dedicated his work to the Chinese artist and dissident, Ai Weiwei, who has been detained without charge by the Chinese authorities for more than a month.

Kapoor - 1991 winner of the Turner Prize - said he was not sure whether his Leviathan, two years in the making, would look right or even hold together until it was assembled and inflated.

"To me, art should also be about taking risks, about going to places where no one has been before," he said.

- INDEPENDENT