Anish Kapoor

Lisson Gallery, London
Private Collection, Switzerland
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art Evening Auction,  21 June 2007, Lot 19
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition.
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Executed in 2002, Anish Kapoor's magnificent Untitled is a superlative manifestation of the spatial possibilities and innovation of materiality that posit Kapoor at the very forefront of contemporary sculpture. The present work is of utter singularity in Kapoor’s celebrated oeuvre: conjuring ancient pagan stone circles yet evoking an otherworldly endless vacuum, Untitled imparts monumental expression to the incomprehensible and impalpable void. The enduring grandeur of granite here provokes a dialogue that traverses art historical tradition while its sculpted form interrogates the dimensional planes of our phenomenological existence. Comprising a powerful duality between presence and absence, tangibility versus illusion, beauty and the sublime, Kapoor’s Untitled affords an experience of monumental materiality that discloses a suggestion of the infinite. The vacillation between flawless recess and roughly hewn exterior invites circumnavigation, simultaneously drawing us in and refluxing our attention. In alignment with the very best of Kapoor’s creation, this work provokes primal physical and psychological responses, engaging profound cerebral and spiritual discourse, whilst instilling awe via its magnificent and exquisite form.

Untitled is a remarkable manifestation of Kapoor’s central artistic précis: the conjoining of polarities to unearth a veiled state of being in the world. Exuding a pronounced evocation of rite and ritual, this work skirts the peripheries between mysticism and matter. As propounded by Germano Celant, it is precisely this evocation of duality that lies at the crux of Kapoor’s philosophical inquiry: “Only from the double can the centrifugal power of being arise, the infinite dance of an art that proclaims itself as a self-generating, impulsive, mobile, and open to secret and enigma…Kapoor illuminates a holistic vision based on an osmosis between self-impregnating opposites, an interrelation of inside and outside, superficial and subterranean, conscious and unconscious” (Germano Celant, Anish Kapoor, London 1996, p. XVI).

Simultaneously expelling and attracting, the magnetic power of Untitled is centred on the Kapoorian leitmotif of the creation of negative, empty space. With no trace of the artist’s hand, Kapoor invokes miraculous form and non-form that seems to stand outside of both temporal and spatial demesnes. In it is the relationship between the collapsing ground and the physicality of roughly hewn rock that granite is caught “in an act of torsion: turning away from an earlier state, emerging from another time… the passage between stone and poetic existence” (Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Anish Kapoor: Making Empitness’, Exhibition Catalogue, London, Hayward Gallery, Anish Kapoor, 1998, p. 22). Created on a human scale this solid granite work reacts and interacts with our own sense of bounded corporeal embodiment, strongly imploring to and directly obfuscating sensorial perception.

Kapoor has identified that "There is a history in the stone and through this simple device of excavating the stone it's just as if a whole narrative sequence is suddenly there" (the artist cited in: Ibid., p. 27). Via the solidity of obsidian materiality, Untitled evidences its own epic creation in the earth's crust: its polished surfaces and hewn geometric forms narrate a miraculous transformation from raw material into sculpture. This echoes Kapoor's explanation that "at the end of the process...the stone becomes something else, becomes light, becomes a proposition" (Ibid, p. 29).

Internationally acclaimed for producing a stunning sculptural canon centred on an interrogation space and the sublime, Kappor’s innovation has proceeded to influence an entire generation of sculptors. According to Germano Celant: 'The artist has a central place in the history of culture because he has the power to give new forms to matter, endowing it with new character' (Germano Celant, Anish Kapoor, Milan 1998, p. XI). Untitled is an exquisite demonstration of Celant's observation: this work exudes Kapoor’s exceptional ability to condition space by harnessing and shaping the phenomenal properties and aesthetics of natural materials. Invoking sacred mysticism and a transcendent sense of the unknown, this work masterfully hints at the intangible and ineffable, monumentally present yet evoking that which is beyond our reach.