Richard Serra, Tilted Spheres, 2002-2004, Pearson Pier F, Toronto © Photo by David Cooper / Toronto Star via Getty Images
Working with highly-polished surfaces is the result of a natural evolution from Kapoor’s manipulation of pigments and assessment of voids. Kapoor explains that his works prior to the mirror series ‘dealt with the idea that deep space is one of the things that seem to confuse the status of the object. At some point in the mid-90s I began to wonder if mirror-polished objects had the same spatial qualities’ (ibid., pp. 51-2). However, unlike his experiments with the representations of a void, Kapoor’s mirrors instead directly engage with the viewer’s spatial reality. Untitled is a prime example of Kapoor’s greatly varied and conceptual oeuvre, with which he has succeeded in expanding the language
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of contemporary art in new and unexpected directions. Today Kapoor has established himself at the forefront of contemporary sculpture as he continues solidifying his prolifc career. As Partha Mitter concludes when refecting on the artist, ‘Kapoor’s visionary engagement with his material, his soaring artistic ambition, his extraordinary manipulation of scale from intimate objects to vast alterations of architectural sites, his use of materials from hard-edged polished metal to sof Vaseline, the constant play of paradoxes in his pieces – these elements make his work some of the most exciting in the last decades’ (Partha Mitter, ‘History, Memory and Anish Kapoor’, exh. cat. Anish Kapoor: Past Present Future,2006, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, p. 109).
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