Anish Kapoor - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 13, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Private Collection

  • Catalogue Essay


    With its stainless steel surface of impeccably mirror-like polish, the present lot, Untitled, 2007, is a signature work for Anish Kapoor. The sculpture reflects an upside-down portrait of the viewers, interiors, and architecture surrounding it. Kapoor’s sculpture invites the viewer in and provokes their engagement allowing them to look at the world afresh with this flipped view. The viewer experiences simple mystery, beauty and fascination through the glossy finished reflective facades. Kapoor‘s desire to go beyond the object is emphasized here in the limitless space of the reflective world.
    The perspectival distance between subject and object, or the mimetic balance between the mirror and its reflection, are replaced by a movement of  rasure and inversion—‘reverse, affirm, negate.’ It is as if the possibility of pictoriality or image-making, associated with visual pleasure, has been unsettled to reveal emptiness, darkness, blankness, the blind spot. However the purpose of Kapoor’s work is not to represent the mediation of light and darkness, or negative and positive space, in a dialectical relationship in which emptiness will travel through the darkening mirror to assume the plenitude of presence. Kapoor stays with the state of transitionality, allowing it the time and space to develop its own affects —anxiety, unease, restlessness—so that viewing becomes part of the process of making the work itself. The spectator’s relation to the object involves a process of questioning the underlying conditions through which the work becomes a visual experience in the first place.
    H. Bhabha, “Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness,” Anish Kapoor, London,
    1998, p. 11

123

Untitled

2007

Stainless steel.

55 x 55 x 12 in. (140 x 140 x 30 cm).

Estimate
$700,000 - 1,000,000 

Sold for $812,500

Contemporary Art Part I

13 May 2010
New York