Anish Kapoor

Lisson Gallery, London
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007

London, Lisson Gallery, Anish Kapoor, October - November 2006

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the colour changes between blue and purple depending on the viewpoint. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is some very light and unobtrusive wear to the sharp edges in places. Visible only upon extremely close inspection in raking light, there is a small and unobtrusive rub mark to the centre inside of the sculpture, one to the centre left side of the back, and some light and superficial scratches to the back of the protruding element.
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"In a painting the space is beyond the picture plane, but in the mirrored voids it is in front of the object and includes the viewer. It's the contemporary equivalent of the sublime, which is to do with the self - it's presence, absence or loss. According to the Kantian idea, the sublime is dangerous because it induces vertigo - you might fall into the abyss and be lost forever. In these sculptures you lose yourself in the infinite."

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor in conversation with Sarah Kent: Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, No. 104, Autumn 2009, p. 43

In Out perfectly encapsulates Anish Kapoor’s career-long exploration of alternative space though his inventive and world-renowned sculptural practice. Commanding in scale and flawless in form, the immense work offers a glimpse of a mirrored dimension that echoes and inverts our own perception of space, creating a tension between reality and illusion.

Since the very start of his artistic career, Kapoor has probed the limits of spatial representation; his early series of pigmented floor objects, 1,000 Names (1979-80), explored the boundary between submersion and protrusion with incredibly innovative sculptural forms. In the mid-1990s, Kapoor began producing wallmounted mirror sculptures that simultaneously reflected and manipulated the space around them, involving the viewer in the piece as he or she moved by. The subtle, unearthly curves of the sculptures—like those of In Out—invert the reflections within them to present the viewer with a rippling, distorted echo of his own image.

Although Kapoor’s sculptures are brilliantly innovative in their inquiry of space, his style
is deeply rooted in the tradition of minimalist sculpture. In their breathtaking simplicity, his works recall Donald Judd’s Specific Objects; like Judd’s Objects, Kapoor’s pieces demand that the viewer abandon any representational references and meet sculpture on its own, simplified aesthetic terms. Kapoor’s sculptures also recall the groundbreaking oeuvre of Lucio Fontana, whose pieces seek to articulate a dimension beyond the limits and restrictions of the canvas. Of his own work, Kapoor notes, “It seemed it was not a mirrored object but an object full of mirroredness. The spatial questions it seemed to ask were not about deep space but about present space, which I began to think about as a new sublime. If the traditional sublime is in deep space, then this 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” (Exh. Cat., Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art, Anish Kapoor, 2008, p. 52).

In Out epitomizes Kapoor’s “spatial adventure,” as the artist masterfully manipulates the areas around and within his sculpture. The smooth, undulating curvature of the work eloquently articulates the space around the piece, accentuating the perfect form of Kapoor’s creation. Within the sculpture’s static form, however, the gleaming purple surface reflects a dimension that is beyond our grasp, where the familiar world is utterly warped and inverted. As the viewer moves past the work, his own image sliding and gleaming over the surface, it seems as though the work could abandon stasis at any moment to flow across the floor and immerse the viewer in its unfathomable, intangible depths.