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Lot Essay
Shining in brilliant emerald green, Anish Kapoor’s Wave Torus Tondo seduces the viewer with its ever changing luminous surface. At over four feet across, the Tondo encases the viewer with its impressive scale and constantly evolving visual experience. As the viewer moves around the work, the emerald green melds into a radiant royal blue. In the shape of a torus—a surface generated by a circle rotated about an axis in its plane that does not intersect the circle—the work both minimizes and magnifies its reflection and is both concave and convex. Reflecting back a jewel toned version of the surrounding atmosphere with an optical illusion, the work subverts the viewer’s expectations by creating a binary opposition within the torus. The transformative power of the reflective surface is what initially inspired Kapoor to create these spatial deceptions: “It seemed it was not a mirrored object but an object full of mirroredness…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 this a whole new spatial adventure. To make new art you have to make new space” (A. Kapoor, quoted in Anish Kapoor, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2008, p. 53).
Executed in 2009, Wave Torus Tondo is from a larger series of Wave Torus works initially exhibited at Lisson Gallery’s Anish Kapoor: New Works. These works expand on Kapoor’s fascination of curved reflective surfaces which he began to develop in the mid-1990s, many of which are now in famed museum collections. Fabricating either concave or convex wall sculptures, Kapoor played with different environments to encapsulate yet disorient the viewer. Using both reflective mirrored surfaces and opaque pigment treatments, the artist continually developed new ways to disorient both the viewer and the surrounding space. The reflective works turn the world upside creating a universe which seems solid into an ephemeral fleeting moment. For Kapoor “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 what happens with concave surfaces is, in my view, completely beguiling. They cease to be physical and it is that ceasing to be physical that I’m after” (Ibid.). The pigmented sculptures trick the viewer in thinking the work is a solid plane, drawing them further in, only to find a void of space and color. Kapoor stated that “there was part of it that protruded into the world but the rest was really interesting. If you look at the pigment pieces, nearly everything else I have done is set there, and I keep going back to them” (A. Kapoor, quoted in ‘Kapoor on Kapoor’, The Guardian, 8 November 2008). This duality created by a seemingly simple object has always motivated Kapoor, which he continues to develop. In the Wave Torus series, he evolves the simple sphere into the torus, a twisted and torqued variant constructing a world of instability.
Born in India in 1954, and educated at art schools in London during the 1970s, Kapoor came to international acclaim in the late 1980s. He carved a distinctive path for himself, undermining the longstanding sculptural tradition of truth to materials—the concept that a sculptor should celebrate the material’s natural qualities rather than to challenge their appearance. Kapoor has said “It seemed to me that all art is all about illusion and the unreal. ‘Truth to materials’ ran, and runs contrary to everything I want to do” (Ibid.). This rebellion is evident in some of Kapoor’s most famous sculptures—Cloud Gate permanently installed in Chicago’s Millennium Park and Sky Mirror which has been featured in Rockefeller Center in New York City and Kensington Gardens in London. Though both works are fabricated from polished stainless steel, the true medium is the reflection, forcing the material itself to dissolve allowing the viewer to see the world from a different point of view.
Kapoor’s play on truth to materials also extends to the viewer. Without the viewer, the experience of mystery, distortion, and illusion would not be as ever present. Wave Tondo Torus embraces this, begging the viewer to enter the space the work envelops; consuming the viewer in a sea of color, altering the surrounding environment. As the viewer activates the work, the object itself dissolves becoming a void bringing the work into the sublime.
Executed in 2009, Wave Torus Tondo is from a larger series of Wave Torus works initially exhibited at Lisson Gallery’s Anish Kapoor: New Works. These works expand on Kapoor’s fascination of curved reflective surfaces which he began to develop in the mid-1990s, many of which are now in famed museum collections. Fabricating either concave or convex wall sculptures, Kapoor played with different environments to encapsulate yet disorient the viewer. Using both reflective mirrored surfaces and opaque pigment treatments, the artist continually developed new ways to disorient both the viewer and the surrounding space. The reflective works turn the world upside creating a universe which seems solid into an ephemeral fleeting moment. For Kapoor “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 what happens with concave surfaces is, in my view, completely beguiling. They cease to be physical and it is that ceasing to be physical that I’m after” (Ibid.). The pigmented sculptures trick the viewer in thinking the work is a solid plane, drawing them further in, only to find a void of space and color. Kapoor stated that “there was part of it that protruded into the world but the rest was really interesting. If you look at the pigment pieces, nearly everything else I have done is set there, and I keep going back to them” (A. Kapoor, quoted in ‘Kapoor on Kapoor’, The Guardian, 8 November 2008). This duality created by a seemingly simple object has always motivated Kapoor, which he continues to develop. In the Wave Torus series, he evolves the simple sphere into the torus, a twisted and torqued variant constructing a world of instability.
Born in India in 1954, and educated at art schools in London during the 1970s, Kapoor came to international acclaim in the late 1980s. He carved a distinctive path for himself, undermining the longstanding sculptural tradition of truth to materials—the concept that a sculptor should celebrate the material’s natural qualities rather than to challenge their appearance. Kapoor has said “It seemed to me that all art is all about illusion and the unreal. ‘Truth to materials’ ran, and runs contrary to everything I want to do” (Ibid.). This rebellion is evident in some of Kapoor’s most famous sculptures—Cloud Gate permanently installed in Chicago’s Millennium Park and Sky Mirror which has been featured in Rockefeller Center in New York City and Kensington Gardens in London. Though both works are fabricated from polished stainless steel, the true medium is the reflection, forcing the material itself to dissolve allowing the viewer to see the world from a different point of view.
Kapoor’s play on truth to materials also extends to the viewer. Without the viewer, the experience of mystery, distortion, and illusion would not be as ever present. Wave Tondo Torus embraces this, begging the viewer to enter the space the work envelops; consuming the viewer in a sea of color, altering the surrounding environment. As the viewer activates the work, the object itself dissolves becoming a void bringing the work into the sublime.