Lot 29
  • 29

Anish Kapoor

Estimate
250,000 - 350,000 GBP
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Description

  • Anish Kapoor
  • Untitled
  • pigment on fibreglass
  • 134.5 by 134.5 by 76.5cm.
  • 53 by 53 by 30in.
  • Executed in 1990.

Provenance

Lisson Gallery, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited

Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art, No Object, No Subject, No Matter, 2002

 

Condition

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly brighter and more vibrant in the original. The catalogue illustration fails to fully capture the concave shape and the soft texture of the blue pigment in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are some very light handling marks along the lower right edge.
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Catalogue Note

"Here we are in the realm of the unlimited, the infinite, a kind of vortex that engulfs and annuls things, a reflection that breaks and overturns the discontinuity of being, enabling it to attain an absolute purity and perfection."  Germano Celant, Anish Kapoor, Milan 1998, p. 38

Anish Kapoor's Untitled from 1990 is the embodiment of the artist's romantic notions geniously rendered in the perfection of colour and form.  As one of the earliest wall mounted works, it dramatically extends out into space while the deep blue colour radiates a quiet energy permeating the surrounding space.  Its surface, lavishly covered in a dense Prussian blue pigment, is carefully and methodically composed and lends a softness to the work – the pigment offering a tactility through its inviting texture.  Structurally, Kapoor draws on his background in architecture and created a fibreglass armature which is perfectly balanced and symmetrical.  In Untitled, Kapoor realizes through pure simplicity of shape and colour, a sumptuous representation of his earliest objectives. 

Kapoor executed his first half-sphere in fibreglass, covered in a thick layer of rich powdery blue pigment in 1987.  Entitled At the Hub of Things, this work was to begin the series of 'Voids' whose monumental and architectural proportions make it loom over anyone who approaches and immediately engulfs them into a tide of ravishing colour.  Much like his predecessor Yves Klein, who was also deeply enchanted with the colour of deep blue, best rendered in his iconic IKB monochromes, Kapoor also sought to create art which would engage his viewer and transport them into a sublime state of being.  Acknowledging both Western and Eastern cultures as influences in his work, Kapoor emphasized the powerful spiritual and mythological resonances of his art.  He transformed his materials in an almost alchemical process, into meditative structures where the viewer can more directly experience sensations. 

As the artist reflects, "The void is not silent.  I have always thought of it more and more as a transitional space, an in-between space.  It's very much to do with time.  I have always been interested as an artist in how one can somehow look again for that very first moment of creativity where everything is possible and nothing has actually happened.  It's a space of becoming... 'something' that dwells in the presence of the work... that allows it or forces it not to be what it states it is in the first instance"  (The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery, Anish Kapoor, 1998, pp. 35-36).

As if mystically suspended in air, the present wall sculpture exhibits both the interplay of attraction and resistance, gravity and vertigo.  Kapoor was fascinated by the interplay of form and light in his sculpture and aspired to evoke a sense of mystery.  The enormous mass of blue and the sculpture's concave shape creates an abyss, harnessing energy and penetrating the space, at once capturing the observer's gaze if not enveloping his entire body.  To plunge into the depths of one of Kapoor's sculptures such as Untitled, entails losing oneself or experiencing, as the artist refers to it, a 'sensual uncertainty' (Germano Celant, Anish Kapoor, Milan 1998, p. xxx).  One is aware of the profound effect this has and of being pulled into the sublime vortex of an energy mass, Kapoor recognizing this himself declaring "I have always felt drawn towards some notion of fear in a very visual sense, towards sensations of falling, of being pulled inwards, of losing one's self" (ibid., p. xxx).  The ultimate goal is to arrive at a feeling of transformation, or higher enlightenment.

Untitled evinces one of the key conflicts in art that permeates all Kapoor's work: that of the issue of balance between the visible and the spiritual; between the concrete material of a work and its idea; between the form and the void.  In a similar vein as his predecessors the Abstract Expressionists who consumed themselves in the late 1950s with colour field painting and used colour as a vehicle to evoke states of extreme feeling, Kapoor too seeks to reach his viewer through the realm of colour and presence.  Losing oneself in the purifying blue, which concretizes body and spirit, thus enables one to recapture an elsewhere that is in continual motion: "Colour is a real transformer.  It changes things very directly... Recently I have tended to work more with space, with conditioning the space in such a way as to bring about different states of being.  I see different works in terms of different states of being" (ibid., p. xxx).