Anish Kapoor - Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Thursday, May 10, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Sircom di Minini Massimo & Sons, Brescia, Italy
    Private Collection

  • Exhibited

    Brescia, Italy, Galleria Massimo Minini, Anish Kapoor, May 26 - July 30, 2010

  • Catalogue Essay

    That’s what I am interested in: the void, the moment when it isn’t a hole, it is a space full of what isn’t there.

    ANISH KAPOOR

    (Anish Kapoor, in C. Higgins, “A Life in Art: Anish Kapoor”, The Guardian, November 7, 2008).

    Anish Kapoor’s sculptural output of the past three decades has become contemporary art’s defining mode of bridging the gap between physical and mental space. Kapoor has succeeded in giving emptiness the same philosophical and aesthetic weight as that which is solid. His enormous public installations have breathed new life into familiar cityscapes: mirroring and flipping portions of Central Park before the viewer’s eyes, creating polished surfaces that reorient the observer to his position on the ground (and, consequently, deconstructing his spatial ontology). Burrowing into reflective surfaces, Kapoor has manipulated the notion of space to exhilarating and wildly unfamiliar ends. As he subtracts structure in his sculpture, Kapoor adds into his work infinitely more—a space in which to explore and imagine.

    Kapoor’s Untitled, 2008, contains all of the spatial tropes of his larger work, as well as contributing several dimensions uncommon in his oeuvre. The first particularly striking feature of Untitled, 2008, is its monolithic, yet fairly complex structure. Shaped from a single piece of stainless steel, which results in a radiant reflectivity on its unpainted surface, the present lot possesses a binary personality. Viewed from its obverse, unpainted angle, Untitled, 2008, displays a network of metallic loops that steady its position upon the ground. Yet, as one redirects his vision to the interior surface—colored a brilliant crimson—he is privy to a wealth of sensuous construction. The concave steel bends and flows into itself beneath its pinched roof, creating a number of smooth, undulating surfaces. At its furthest point inside the superstructure, the crimson steel morphs into a single point, where reflectivity is maximized for the observer. Overall, Kapoor creates a basin of wonderful complexity. After we have bent our bodies to examine the innermost workings of Untitled, 2008, Kapoor’s reward is simple: a glittering sphere of empty space. And, having detached ourselves from Kapoor’s piece, the void stays with us, reminding us that many of the most satisfying rewards are not material at all.

23

Untitled

2008
stainless steel
9 1/4 x 48 1/2 x 19 in. (23.5 x 123.2 x 48.2 cm)
This work is unique.

Estimate
$300,000 - 500,000 

Sold for $362,500

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

10 May 2012
New York