Anish Kapoor

 “The void is not silent. I have always thought of it more and more as a transitional space, and in-between space. It’s very much to do with time. 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 in the first instance.” (Anish Kapoor cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery, Anish Kapoor, 1998, pp. 35-36)

Anish Kapoor’s Blood Mirror operates within the limitless realm of sensation, immersing the viewer within a feeling that can be likened to turning the world upside down. Unlike the vertigo inducing, immaterial voids of his infinite ‘holes in space’, this large, reflective disk of polished steel sucks in and reflects all of its surroundings, presenting the world inverted as if in a bowl.

Eternally divided between inner and outer realms, Kapoor's Blood Mirror fuses the world of the viewer with that of its object self. Its concave form activates the transformative properties of the polished steel, capturing the eternally changing natural world within its fixed, artificial grasp. The act of looking places the viewer as the link uniting the two – a dialectic function usually performed in Kapoor’s work by the hollow or void itself. Compared to the impenetrable darkness of his earlier void works of the late 1980s and early 90s, Blood Mirror’s forever reflecting luminosity is affirmed by its environment.

Through the panoramic vision it presents of the space and life around it, Blood Mirror poetically embodies the reflective powers of art and captures the alchemy of creation. As the viewer moves around it, the energy that unfolds at its core changes eternally with its perspective as events in its experience become events in the visual work. This sunken, metallic abyss of light 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 doing so, it challenges the reality of our perception and is not so much a ‘hole in space’ as a hole in phenomenal reality. In this way it gives visceral and immediate expression to the dualities between presence and absence, infinity and illusion, solidity and intangibility.