阿尼什·卡普爾

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
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 condition.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Anish Kapoor’s Untitled is one of the most exquisite recent examples of the artist’s seminal series of wall-mounted mirror sculptures, in which an intimate sense of engagement is created with the work through the sensual inward curve of the piece. A brilliantly glowing orb of gold hovers against the wall, inviting associations with the power and majesty of the sun itself as life giving source and bringer of light. Within earlier societies the sun - often worshipped as a deity - frequently appeared as a full golden circle adorning a divine figure. The ancient Egyptian sun god, Ra, was depicted in human form with a falcon’s head, the golden disk of the sun shining above his feathers, whilst Taiyang Sheng, a Chinese solar divinity, similarly carries a golden sphere behind his head. In Christian iconography a golden, glowing circle also signified holiness in the guise of a halo, its form transforming over the centuries from a flat, richly embellished golden circle within early medieval art to the more simplified and delicate elipse as depicted within Renaissance and Baroque art. Kapoor’s Untitled is thus arguably a Contemporary manifestation of the ancient universal worship of a golden orb and its manifold desirable associations: warmth, light, life, and – more materially – wealth.

The remarkable physical properties of Untitled –seemingly suspended in front of our astonished eyes with no immediately obvious means of support - also propose more conceptual questions concerning our perception and interpretation of space. In ways similar to Lucio Fontana, whose groundbreaking and illustrious project of Spatialism abandoned dependence on the picture plane to seek another dimension through and beyond the canvas, Kapoor has spoken of his search for the "infinite." Yet unlike Fontana, whose violent slashes and holes tear through the skin of painting as esoteric portals into a theoretical spatial infinity, Kapoor conceives a more accessible domain of "new space" that includes the viewer.

Through the panoramic vision it presents of the space and life around it, Untitled 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 golden 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. As Kapoor observes: "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”(the artist, cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Boston, Institute of Contemporary Art, Anish Kapoor, 2008, p. 52). Untitled, from 2011, truly epitomises this remarkable sense of pioneering discovery and magnificently exemplifies Kapoor’s masterful manipulation of spatial territory.