Provenance
Gladstone Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Catalogue Essay
Anish Kapoor’s Untitled is a luminous example of the artist’s multisensory exploration of space and the gaze within his series of reflective concave mirrors. Peering into the mirror, the viewer is confronted with a magnified vision of themselves as if transformed through pure abstraction. The fractured surface of stainless steel triangles enacts a kaleidoscope effect, absorbing and distorting everything in its path. Executed in 2012, another example of this work is held by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. The perfection of its surface is critical to the aperture’s ability to reflect and magnify objects around it, since the concave form enhances the appearance of every fragment. Its flawlessness makes the viewer lose sight of the medium, becoming immersed in the parallel universe intrinsic to Kapoor’s creations.

Kapoor began creating concave mirrors in the mid-1990s, fascinated by the objects' propensities to oscillate between sensual beauty and uncanny dematerialization. In a 2015 interview about his mirror installation at Versailles, famously the home of a thousand mirrors, Kapoor declared, “Sensuality is terror…Sensuality somehow convinces us we are not alone.” Yet the glittering shadow is offset by the inverted form which resembles a hollow chasm, activated by the presence of the spectator. “A void object is not an empty object; its potential for generative possibility is ever present. It is pregnant. The void returns the gaze. Its blank face forces us to fill in content and meaning. Emptiness becomes fullness. Things are turned upside down…The art I love, the art I make, I hope, celebrates the sensual while always knowing that decay is close” (Anish Kapoor, quoted in “Blood and Light. In Conversation with Julia Kristeva”, 2015, Anish Kapoor, online).

Untitled can be imagined as the culmination of this investigation, one of a series of metonymic works which are implicitly concerned with multiplying spatial illusions, iterating Kapoor’s long-held engagement with geometry as a language of form that explores the nature of the object and our relation to it. With works such as Tall Tree and the Eye, 2009 and the fractured and pixelated surface of Untitled Kapoor introduces an entropic disruption to the space between subject and object, where wholeness is shattered in the multiplicity of distortion the object presents.

The uncanny sense of limitlessness produced by the reflection recalls Kapoor’s interest in the analogy between the idea of the sublime in the artistic tradition and the cosmic concept of a parallel universe. “The spatial questions [the mirrored object] seemed to ask were not about deep space but about present space, which I began to think about as a new sublime. If the traditional sublime is in deep space, then this is proposing that the contemporary sublime is in front of the picture plane, not beyond it,” Kapoor explained (Anish Kapoor, quoted in Anish Kapoor: Past Present Future, exh. cat., The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2008, p. 52). When the viewer peers into its dizzying surface, Untitled subsumes the material body into an illusion of immateriality – an answer to an unspoken question, the embodiment of spiritual self-perception realized.

The Romantic pursuit of the sublime figures strongly in Kapoor’s influences, particularly Caspar David Friedrich’s hypnotic paintings of Rückenfigur: people seen from behind, contemplating vast landscapes swathed in pale fog. By rendering his characters anonymous, his landscapes vague, Friedrich allowed his spectators to identify themselves at the precipice of the unknown. By contrast, Untitled performs the same visual alchemy in front of the picture plane rather than on its surface, enabling the potential for transcendence through the warped dimension of the convex shell.

Catalyzing the surrounding environment in a brilliant reflective vortex, Untitled symbolizes the essence of sight and perception as plane, space and image. As art historian Victoria Turvey Sauron wrote on Kapoor’s mirrored works, “This all-surface is both fascinatingly beautiful and profoundly threatening, profoundly implicating the subject’s gaze while threatening its very coherence, by suggesting that both subject and gaze are being sucked inside an interior which cannot be known or imagined, the sense of surface is so overwhelming” (Victoria Turvey Sauron, The Sacred and the Feminine, New York, 2009, p. 196).

Property from a Distinguished Private Collection

44

Anish Kapoor

Untitled

signed and dated "Anish Kapoor 2012" on the reverse
stainless steel and resin
78 3/4 x 78 3/4 x 14 in. (200 x 200 x 35.6 cm.)
Executed in 2012.

Estimate
$700,000 - 900,000

Sold for $860,000

Contact Specialist
Amanda Lo Iacono
Head of Evening Sale
New York
+1 212 940 1278

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York Auction 16 May | On View at 432 and 450 Park Avenue

1
Donald Judd
Untitled
Estimate $600,000 - 800,000
Sold for $1,820,000
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2
Roy Lichtenstein
Small Wall Explosion
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $860,000
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3
Andy Warhol
David Hockney
Estimate $400,000 - 600,000
Sold for $1,040,000
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4
Andy Warhol
Two Coke Bottles
Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $1,580,000
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5
Roy Lichtenstein
Modern Painting
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $2,900,000
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6
Robert Motherwell
Open No. 119: In Blue with Charcoal Line
Estimate $1,500,000 - 2,000,000
Sold for $1,520,000
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7
Roy Lichtenstein
Horse and Rider
Estimate $6,000,000 - 8,000,000
Sold for $5,955,000
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8
Andy Warhol
Roy Lichtenstein
Estimate $300,000 - 400,000
Sold for $475,000
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9
Andy Warhol
9 Flowers
Estimate $2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Sold for $2,600,000
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10
Fernando Botero
The Lovers
Estimate $450,000 - 550,000
Sold for $524,000
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11
Alexander Calder
Black Gamma
Estimate $5,000,000 - 7,000,000
Sold for $5,477,500
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12
David Hockney
Study from Parade Triple Bill
Estimate $600,000 - 800,000
Sold for $437,500
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13
Andy Warhol
Soup Can
Estimate $700,000 - 900,000
Sold for $500,000
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14
Joan Miró
Conque
Estimate $600,000 - 800,000
Sold for $800,000
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15
Alexander Calder
White Versus Yellow
Estimate $500,000 - 700,000
Sold for $1,400,000
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16
Nicolas Party
Landscape
Estimate $100,000 - 150,000
Sold for $608,000
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17
KAWS
THE WALK HOME
Estimate $600,000 - 800,000
Sold for $5,955,000
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18
Jordan Casteel
Self Portrait
Estimate $60,000 - 80,000
Sold for $237,500
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19
KAWS
UNTITLED (MBFU9)
Estimate $300,000 - 500,000
Sold for $1,340,000
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20
Tomoo Gokita
Be Just Like Family
Estimate $250,000 - 350,000
Sold for $1,076,000
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21
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Robot Man
Estimate $2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Sold for $3,860,000
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22
Yayoi Kusama
Accumulation by Space (No.62.CO.)
Estimate $500,000 - 700,000
Sold for $2,060,000
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23
Eva Hesse
No title
Estimate $2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Sold for $3,980,000
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24
Mark Bradford
Helter Skelter II
Estimate $8,000,000 - 12,000,000
Sold for $8,475,250
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25
Richard Diebenkorn
Untitled
Estimate $1,000,000 - 1,500,000
Sold for $1,220,000
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26
Frank Stella
Scramble: Descending Blue Values/Ascending Spectrum
Estimate $2,500,000 - 3,500,000
Sold for $3,020,000
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27
Willem de Kooning
Untitled XVI
Estimate $8,000,000 - 12,000,000
Sold for $10,268,000
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28
David Hockney
Iris with Evian Bottle
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $2,204,000
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29
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Self Portrait
Estimate $9,000,000 - 12,000,000
Sold for $9,500,000
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30
Keith Haring and LA II (Angel Ortiz)
Untitled (Two-Panel Mural)
Estimate $700,000 - 900,000
Sold for $1,040,000
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31
Donald Judd
Untitled
Estimate $1,250,000 - 1,750,000
Sold for $1,385,000
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32
Robert Motherwell
Untitled (Elegy)
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
Sold for $4,580,000
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33
Pat Steir
Monk Tuyu Meditating Waterfall
Estimate $600,000 - 800,000
Sold for $800,000
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34
Dana Schutz
Signing
Estimate $250,000 - 350,000
Sold for $980,000
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35
Robert Colescott
Knowledge of the Past is the Key to the Future: The Original
Estimate $300,000 - 500,000
Sold for $400,000
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36
This lot is no longer available.
37
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled (Piss Piss Piss Piss)
Estimate $600,000 - 800,000
Sold for $620,000
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38
Cy Twombly
Untitled
Estimate $4,000,000 - 6,000,000
Sold for $4,700,000
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39
This lot is no longer available.
40
Mark Tansey
View from Mt. Hermeneut
Estimate $1,000,000 - 1,500,000
Sold for $1,040,000
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41
Christopher Wool
Untitled
Estimate $2,000,000 - 3,000,000
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42
Jean Dubuffet
Ciboulot Pistolet
Estimate $500,000 - 700,000
Sold for $500,000
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43
El Anatsui
Alter Ego
Estimate $800,000 - 1,200,000
Sold for $860,000
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44
Anish Kapoor
Untitled
Estimate $700,000 - 900,000
Sold for $860,000
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45
Chris Ofili
The Naked Spirit of Captain Shit and the Legend of the Black Stars
Estimate $400,000 - 600,000
Sold for $475,000
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20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

New York Auction 16 May | On View at 432 and 450 Park Avenue

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Provenance

Catalogue Essay

44

Anish Kapoor

Untitled

20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale

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