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Lot Essay
‘The work is a memorial to a great building.’
—ANISH KAPOOR
As it sits bathed in the otherworldly, red aura of its Perspex box, the mass of charcoal at the heart of Anish Kapoor’s Untitled (2016) remembers both the construction and the destruction of the Mackintosh Building, while seeming to point to something else. While the Perspex casing gives the work an air of the museum artefact – memory saved and preserved – the red glow that encloses the charcoal seems to perform a kind of transubstantiation, turning the physical trace of the Building into something else.
Kapoor’s rich, regal red has become one of the distinguishing features of the artist’s work; not only does it conjure visions of blood and the body, but in its reappearance across Kapoor’s oeuvre, it seems to communicate an ambiguous, polyvalent personal symbolism. ‘Red is a colour I've felt very strongly about’ Kapoor has said, ‘Maybe red is a very Indian colour, maybe it's one of those things that I grew up with and recognise at some other level. Of course, it is the colour of the interior of our bodies. Red is the centre’ (A. Kapoor, ‘In Conversation with John Tusa’, https://anishkapoor.com/180/in-conversation-with-john-tusa-2 [accessed 8 February 2017]). Yet the red of Untitled is not the corporeal red of flesh and blood but a more ethereal radiance: it seems to both conserve the charcoal while imbuing it with a new, mystical power.
—ANISH KAPOOR
As it sits bathed in the otherworldly, red aura of its Perspex box, the mass of charcoal at the heart of Anish Kapoor’s Untitled (2016) remembers both the construction and the destruction of the Mackintosh Building, while seeming to point to something else. While the Perspex casing gives the work an air of the museum artefact – memory saved and preserved – the red glow that encloses the charcoal seems to perform a kind of transubstantiation, turning the physical trace of the Building into something else.
Kapoor’s rich, regal red has become one of the distinguishing features of the artist’s work; not only does it conjure visions of blood and the body, but in its reappearance across Kapoor’s oeuvre, it seems to communicate an ambiguous, polyvalent personal symbolism. ‘Red is a colour I've felt very strongly about’ Kapoor has said, ‘Maybe red is a very Indian colour, maybe it's one of those things that I grew up with and recognise at some other level. Of course, it is the colour of the interior of our bodies. Red is the centre’ (A. Kapoor, ‘In Conversation with John Tusa’, https://anishkapoor.com/180/in-conversation-with-john-tusa-2 [accessed 8 February 2017]). Yet the red of Untitled is not the corporeal red of flesh and blood but a more ethereal radiance: it seems to both conserve the charcoal while imbuing it with a new, mystical power.