Anish Kapoor - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Friday, October 17, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia

  • Catalogue Essay

    “the void is not silent. I have always thought of it more and more as a transitional space, an in between space. It’s very much to do with time. It’s a space of becoming something that dwells in the presence of the work that allows it, or forces it, not to be what it states in the first instance. (Anish Kapoor in: Anish Kapoor, London Hayward Gallery, 1998 pp. 35-36)
     
    The work of Anish Kapoor increasingly started to focus on the subject of the void, toying with the powerful tension between positive and negative space, resulting in sculptures that seem to recede into the distance, distort the surrounding space or disappear all together. This monolithic work from 2001 is defined as much by its negative space as by the palpable material which composes it and the hallowed area on its face imbues an almost primordial religious significance into an otherwise mundane object. In carving the face of the sculpture and smoothing parts of its surface, Kapoor carves out a space in which the art inherent within the material
    is gloriously and ceremoniously revealed.
     
    Through his sparse and codified language, Kapoor seeks to understand and communicate ideas on the human condition. The artist successfully draws attention to our own humanity by creating works which play with
    the viewer’s sense of space, time and other physical realities. ‘Personally,’ the artist states that, ‘I have always been drawn to a nation of fear, towards a sensation of vertigo, of falling, of being pulled inwards. This is a notion
    of the sublime which reverses the picture of union with light. This is an inversion, a sort of turning inside-out.This is a vision of darkness.’ (Anish Kapoor quoted in Germano Celant, Anish Kapoor, Milan 1998, p. XXXV)
     
    ‘Emerging from velvety black granite, this monumental sculpture embodies Kapoor’s duality between object and non-object. He creates a tension between the rough-hewn edges of the organic matter and its now sumptuously polished face but allows for momentary interruptions of this stone’s imperfections to remain throughout. According to the artist, there is 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… at the end of the process the stone becomes something else, becomes light, becomes a proposition, becomes a lens’ (Hayward Gallery, eds, Anish Kapoor, London, pp. 27, 29).The material, which simultaneously celebrates and sheds its reputation as a hard and unforgiving element, is not conquered, as in the virtuosic carvings of Bernini or Michelangelo, but instead has seemingly evolved to an elevated states of its own existence.  
     

356

Untitled

2001
Black granite.
155.6 x 191.8 x 30.5 cm. (61 1/4 x 75 1/2 x 12 in).
This work is unique.

Estimate
£300,000 - 400,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

18 Oct 2008, 7pm
London