Mirror (Organic Green to Oriental Blue)

Polished to perfection, Anish Kapoor’s Mirror (Organic Green to Oriental Blue) (2016) lures the viewer into its otherworldly depths. Its rare tonal gradient, shifting from green to blue from left to right, makes it a majestic and singular example of the reflective concave mirrors that lie at the heart of Kapoor’s sculptural practice. Peering into the iridescent abyss of the sculpture, our perceptual faculties are temporarily suspended. Every slight movement is registered, reflected and magnified in its lacquered exterior, destabilising reality to the point of sublimation. ‘The interesting thing about a polished surface to me,’ Kapoor has explained, ‘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’ (A. Kapoor, quoted in Anish Kapoor, exh. cat. Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston 2008, p. 53). Mirror (Organic Green to Oriental Blue) operates as an existential portal: a strange meeting point between the immaterial and material worlds, in which we are brought face to face with the deep, resonant void. Its immersive scale and intense chromatic glamour bring about a kind of transfiguration, throwing the viewer’s physical presence into stark relief. In our encounter with interminable nothingness, all sense of self dissolves.

Kapoor has spoken of his debt to Romantic artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, who sought to capture moments of spiritual awe in their art. While they sought the sublime in the splendour of landscapes, however, Kapoor’s art explores interior, emotional terrains. Rather than mediating through a representation of a person or a place, his work aspires to directly provoke the transformative experience of the sublime. Like the protagonist of Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) gazing over rocky clifftops to the swirling mists beneath, the viewer of Mirror (Organic Green to Oriental Blue) is made conscious of themselves standing on the precipice of an unknowable vastness. Kapoor’s development of his Romantic forebears’ ideas of the sublime also relates to his invocation of the Hindu notion of svayambh or the ‘self-made’ object, capable of producing independent meaning through its interaction with the environment. ‘The traditional sublime is the matte surface, deep and absorbing, and [the] shiny might be a modern sublime, which is fully reflective, absolutely present, and returns the gaze’, Kapoor has stated. ‘... My aim is to separate the object from its object-hood’ (A. Kapoor, quoted in H. Reitmaier, ‘Anish Kapoor in conversation with Heidi Reitmaier’, Tate Magazine, July 2007).