“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 KapoorFloating weightlessly, like a kaleidoscopic window into another dimension, Anish Kapoor’s 2013 mirrored, wall-mounted Untitled is an elegant and immersive example of the artist’s curved sculptures and of his ongoing philosophical investigations into space and infinitude. Pushing the possibilities of his materials to their limits here, Kapoor fractures the stainless-steel surface of his iconic, highly polished and reflective mirror works into hundreds of small triangular planes, interlocked with one another in a dizzying, prismatic design. The effect is both visually and sensorially disarming, the physical properties of Kapoor’s materials and his treatment of them challenging our perception and interpretation of space on both conceptual and embodied terms.

 

Far from static, the mirrored surfaces of these concave sculptures shift and change continuously, confusing the boundaries between inside and out, distorting and transforming the world reflected in their shallow, fractured depths as if bringing it into being. Confronting the work, the viewer is drawn into its depths, displaced into a splintered, inverted space. Fundamentally participatory, these works draw on the psychological power of Louise Bourgeois’ sculptural Cell installations, although in their sustained investigations into spatial experience, light, and materiality, they are more properly aligned to the mid-century experiments of the ZERO movement and the pioneering sculptural work of Heinz Mack. Working first on the two-dimensional picture plane, Mack developed concepts around a new structural order of pictorial space which he termed ‘The New Dynamic Sculpture’, fully realised in his sculptural reliefs where the formal and metaphysical properties of his highly reflective materials present dramatic interventions in our perception of space. A member of the ZERO group and sharing in their philosophic and aesthetic inquiries, Lucio Fontana similarly searched for the infinite beyond the limits of the canvas. However, where Fontana achieved this by slashing and puncturing the picture plane to project viewers into a spatial infinity beyond, Kapoor instead focuses his attention on the space in front of the work, that which already contains the viewer, ‘its shallow depth […] a skin [which] becomes a hyperactive screen on which the viewer appears live, in multiple, simultaneous, abstracted iterations.’ⁱ

 

One of the most significant and influential artists of his generation, Kapoor’s innovative practice has seen him work across a variety of non-traditional materials, including raw pigment, earth, wax, concrete, and PVC, although his concave sculptures remain amongst his most immediately recognisable works. Kapoor first embarked on these elegant, curved sculptures in the mid 1990s, quickly exploring the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of this new format in a range of different metallic finishes including bronze, highly polished stainless-steel, and gold. As the artist explains: ‘I stumbled onto the idea that one could make an object that was concave. Suddenly this was not just a camouflaged object; it seemed to be a space full of mirror just like the previous works had been a space full of darkness. That felt like a real discovery. What happened was that it wasn’t just a mirror on a positive form – we have had that experience from Brancusi onwards. This seemed to be a different thing, a different order or object from a mirrored exterior.’ⁱⁱ Provoking profound meditations on our embodied experience of space, the Turner Prize-winning artist quickly discovered that far from being more passive ‘mirrored objects’, the sculptures were activated into objects into ‘full of mirroredness […] a whole new spatial adventure’, one that is especially pronounced in the more complex design of the present work.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Currently the subject of a major retrospective at ARKEN – his first in Scandinavia – Anish Kapoor has enjoyed extensive solo exhibitions internationally and in 2022 became the first British artist to be honoured with a major, dual-gallery exhibition at the Gallerie dell’Accademia and Palazzo Manfrin in Venice, running alongside the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. 

• In 1990 Kapoor was selected to represent the United Kingdom at La Biennale di Venezia, where he was awarded the prestigious ‘Premio 2000’ international jury award. After winning the Turner Prize the following year, Kapoor was also awarded the Praemium Imperiale in 2011. Returning to Venice in 2022, Kapoor staged an ambitious exhibition of works at the Galleria dell’Academia which ran alongside the Biennale.

• With similar works now held in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, amongst others, Kapoor’s mirrored sculptures have become almost synonymous with the artist’s practice.

 

 

ⁱ Nicholas Baume in Anish Kapoor, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2008, p. 26.
ⁱⁱ Anish Kapoor, quoted in Hossein Amirsadeghi and Maryam Homayoun Eisler, eds., Sanctuary: Britain’s Artists and their Studios, London, 2011, p. 436.
ⁱⁱⁱ Anish Kapoor, cited in ‘Mythologies in the Making: Anish Kapoor in Conversation with Nicholas Baume’, Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future, exh. cat, Boston, Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2008, p. 52.