Anish Kapoor - Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, May 15, 2024 | Phillips

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  • Random Triangle Mirror, 2016, is a prime example of Kapoor’s ability to craft a transcendent experience from simple geometric forms. In a shimmering array, hundreds of triangular planes coalesce into a concave mirror that mesmerizingly refracts light to kaleidoscopic effect. With pristine constituents that ingeniously build to form something greater than the sum of its parts, the present example represents the culmination of Kapoor’s investigation into the formal and metaphysical possibilities of the mirrored surface. Kapoor’s faceted concave sculptures occupy a principal position in the artist’s oeuvre, with similar examples in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. 

    “A void object is not an empty object; its potential for generative possibility is ever present.”
    —Anish Kapoor
    Random Triangle Mirror demonstrates Kapoor’s interest in the notion of fractals as multiples equaling a whole. Multiplying spatial illusion, the work iterates Kapoor’s long-held engagement with geometry as a formal language through which we can explore the relationship between ourselves and objects. Within the concave mirror Kapoor finds a new sublime defined by sensation, physical presence in time and space, self-awareness and cognition. This new sublime is not an aspect of depth and cannot be found by looking deeply into the surface of the work, but rather is, in the artist’s words, “about present space.”i The experience of Kapoor’s work is about the phenomenological act of viewing instead of the traditional image plane.

     

    In this way, Random Triangle Mirror recalls the experiential qualities of Light and Space works, such as James Turrell’s architectural interventions. There is a spiritual, sensorial experience viewing Turrell’s work as one relinquishes the innate desire to understand its physicality and accepts the work’s immateriality. Similar can be said of the present example, as the physical spaces of the work and viewer collapse into one. The concave shape even creates a unique sonic effect that amplifies and distorts sound when standing in its proximity, altering the viewer’s perceived relationship with the room. This is the intended effect of the artist, as he states: “when the thing that you look at is uncertain, your body demands a kind of readjustment, it demands certainty."ii

    “If the traditional sublime is in deep space, then this [the mirrored object] is proposing that the contemporary sublime is in front of the picture plane, not beyond it. I continue to make these works because I feel this is a whole new spatial adventure”
    —Anish Kapoor

    Kapoor began creating concave mirrors in the mid-1990s, fascinated by the objects' propensities to oscillate between sensual beauty and uncanny dematerialization. The pixelated surface of Random Triangle Mirror introduces an entropic disruption to the space between subject and object, where wholeness is shattered in the multiplicity of distortion the object presents. Kapoor draws upon the mirror’s inextricable relationship to the light and objects it encounters to then subvert its mimetic effect by breaking it up into pixels. Relying on the mirror but refuting its image, Kapoor stresses immateriality over materiality. By employing experience and space as constituents of his work, Kapoor deconstructs empirical space into a virtual realm. 

     

    Anish Kapoor in conversation with Nicholas Baume in Anish Kapoor: Past Present Future, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 2008, p. 52

    ii Anish Kapoor in conversation with Marcello Dantas in Ascension, Sao Paulo, 2006

    • Condition Report

    • Description

      View our Conditions of Sale.

    • Provenance

      Gladstone Gallery, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2016

343

Random Triangle Mirror

signed and dated "Anish Kapoor 2016" on the reverse
stainless steel and resin
70 x 70 x 10 1/2 in. (177.8 x 177.8 x 26.7 cm)
Executed in 2016.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$400,000 - 600,000 

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Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 15 May 2024