Anish Kapoor

Lisson Gallery, London
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2005)
Sale: Christie's, London, Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 30 June 2010, Lot 37
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner 

Exhibition Catalogue, London, Serpentine Gallery, Turning the World Upside Down, 2011, p. 156 and p. 159, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although fails to convey the delicate pastel tonalities and subtle colour variations of the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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Anish Kapoor’s Untitled is a stunning manifestation of the artist’s complex spatial manipulations: a construction of astonishing beauty and sculptural dexterity. Equally adept at working on a monumental scale for public sculpture projects or at a more intimate, human level, Kapoor began creating his magnificently curved, gleaming wall sculptures at the turn of the new millennium. Dating from 2005, Untitled celebrates Kapoor’s exaltation of a more subtle, delicate tonal palette than that of his earlier works, which had been principally focussed on the primaries. A tantalising combination of greens and blues shimmer beneath an opalescent patina, reminiscent of the greatest of Monet’s Water Lilies paintings in its aqueous beauty, whilst the play of light over the gleaming aluminium ground subtly alters the various chromatic hues, enchantingly evoking gentle ripples of sunlight over aquatic depths. Kapoor has long been fascinated by the reflective properties of a highly polished surface, declaring in an interview that: "The interesting thing about a polished surface to me is that when it is really perfect enough something happens - it literally ceases to be physical; it levitates; it does something else, especially on concave surfaces" (the artist in: Exhibition Catalogue, Boston, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Anish Kapoor, 2008, p. 53). This idea of ‘levitation’ seems particularly apposite to Untitled (Green Rainbow Mirror), which appears to hover mysteriously between wall and ground, as though impelled aloft by some unseen force, imbuing the work with an undeniable sense of presence. Untitled effectively acts as a mirror on the world around it: the viewer becomes an integral part of the work through the act of looking, inexorably impacting their own personal view of the piece in a manner which evokes Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle or the so-called ‘observer effect’: the idea that something is inevitably changed by the process of studying and investigating and so can never be seen in its truly original form. This constant state of intensely personal metamorphosis ensures that each person’s interaction with Untitled is utterly unique.


Kapoor makes reference to the concept of the Sublime - the philosophical ideal of the mind’s elevation when contemplating scenes of immense spiritual or natural beauty that came to prominence within art and literature during the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century - when discussing his curved mirror works. "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 - its 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" (the artist in an interview with Sarah Kent in: Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, Autumn 2009, no. 104, p. 43). It is the absence of space - the void - that is of equal importance to the actuality of the mirror itself, the convex curvature seemingly echoing the gravitational bending and warping of space and time combined: the fourth-dimension mysteriously made manifest within the elegantly poetic curves of Untitled.