Untitled, 2004

With its brilliant red surface polished to perfection, Anish Kapoor’s Untitled, 2004, is mesmeric. The sculpture is a majestic example from the artist’s extensive series of concave mirrored surfaces, and the lacquered red gleams seductively. If Kapoor’s earlier works contemplated the physicality of the void, the mirrors present an outward reach, into the terrestrial and real, through their direct embrace of the viewer. Yet these seductive surfaces also alter perception and reality, and onto the luminescent surface, every gesture and every play of shadow is reflected and refracted. As a result, Untitled becomes an enquiry into the very materiality of a world submerged in vivid vermillion. For the artist, the deep red is a colour with much personal resonance; as art historian Stella Paul writes, 'For Kapoor, ‘Red is the colour of the earth, it’s not a colour of deep space; it’s obviously the colour of blood and body. I have a feeling that the darkness it reveals is a much deeper and darker darkness than that of blue or black.’ When asked about the colour of his childhood homeland in India, Kapoor commented, ‘I’m sure it’s red’’ (S. Paul, Chromaphilia: The Story of Colour in Art, New York, 2017, n. p.). That Untitled is so hypnotic owes much to its curved red surface which evokes both interiority and exteriority, a disintegration of form that seems almost miraculous. Operating as both a portal and a mirror, Untitled calls for contemplation while simultaneously challenging the very conditions it creates. As Kapoor himself explained, ‘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’ (A. Kapoor, quoted in Anish Kapoor, exh. cat., Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2008, p. 53).