When art is not viewed, it is traversed.
What happens when art doesn’t show, but erases?
Anish Kapoor creates sculptures that cannot be looked at: they suck you in. He uses mirrors, voids, impossible pigments. He has even “stolen” the blackest black in the universe.
His works do not tell a story: they confront you with mystery.
This is a journey into the art of someone who makes the invisible visible—and silently transforms you.
Anish Kapoor does not create objects: he digs into emptiness. One of the world’s most influential Anglo-Indian sculptors, he transforms matter and space into sensory and spiritual experiences. His works look like holes in space, mirrors of the sky, open wounds. With pure forms and extreme materials, he brings us face to face with the invisible.
He is fascinated by the contrast between complementary categories, such as emptiness and fullness.
Emptiness as a potential space full of meaning. Some of his works are concave and black, like holes or abysses that seem mysteriously charged with contemplative content.
Infinity and extraordinary blend together.
And then there are the mirrored surfaces, where our image is reflected in a distorted or amplified form. The beauty of a new vision blends with the fear of perceiving it in an unexpected way.
Organic forms, the red of blood, the interiority of the human body. The spirituality of bodies and the life-death duo that pursue each other in a mystical and spiritual balance.
Mirrors, concavities: is our perception real? Is it an illusion?
Kapoor plays on illusion, on the trust we have in our senses and on the doubt that pervades us when they betray us.
The materials: steel and water, earth and gold. Organic and inorganic materials, rough and smooth, opaque and shiny: there is tension between form and matter.
Everything, human and natural, organic and inorganic, chaotic and balanced, leads us back to the power of transformation, which is central to the artist’s poetics.
An example of his poetics?
The Bean in Chicago, a shape that seems organic, harmonious, and fluid, expanding the space and reflecting and distorting the environment. Perfectly integrated into it, yet disturbing for the image it reflects of a deformed and frenetic society.
Kapoor’s poetics make use of innovative materials that push the realization of his concepts to the extreme.
One example is the use of Vantablack, which absorbs 99.96% of light, almost completely eliminating any sense of volume or shape.
The objects appear as holes in space.
Vantablack* (an acronym for Vertical Aligned NanoTube Arrays and Black) is a material composed of carbon nanotubes that absorb almost all visible light.
It seemed to be the darkest material known to date, but in 2019, a material ten times darker was discovered: Blackest Black.
Kapoor uses Vantablack to make nothingness three-dimensional.
Objects disappear and when photographed they look like flat, empty black shadows, a hole in flat space.
A spherical sculpture covered in Vantablack looks like a crater, a hole, a gateway to the unknown, an absence.
What is real? Everything, since the work exists, is present in space, but covered in Vantablack, it erases itself, leaving an optical impression that disturbs and unsettles our senses.
For Kapoor, the material is as essential for conveying meaning as the form.
In addition to Vantablack, Kapoor uses pure pigments (often the primary colors red, yellow, and blue), polished stainless steel mirrors, wax, and red paraffin, which evoke blood, transformation, life, stone, marble, resin, water, and concrete, creating contrasts between organic and inorganic, natural and artificial, hardness and fluidity.
Kapoor’s black is a perceptual experiment, shifting the boundaries between presence and absence. It is dematerialization despite the presence of the object, thus the artistic object becomes a mental place. It is a re-examination of time that is frozen: matter becomes a black hole in the universe, which swallows light and attracts us while frightening us: beauty and fear, attraction and hesitation, a re-examination of our senses, a perceptual reinvention of the real world.
“What interests me is the space between what we see and what we know.”
Anish Kapoor
The universe, beauty, the sense of emptiness and fullness have distant familiar roots in Kapoor.
Born in India to a Hindu father and an Iraqi Jewish mother, Kapoor absorbed universal themes that harmonize transcendence and spirituality.
The concept of emptiness comes from Buddhism. Absence as a meaningful presence, cavities and empty spaces that invite contemplation.
Shunyata, a Sanskrit word that can be translated as emptiness, absence, void, is the empty space that precedes creation. Not a lack of existence but a balance before manifestation.
But also Jewish mysticism, using elements of Kabbalah.
Added to this are Eastern philosophies such as Taoism and Zen culture, or the harmony of opposites and the transcendence of the ego.
Kapoor absorbs all the philosophies and religions of his family and becomes a universal artist where everything is kept in balance.
“I am convinced that artists speak the language of mythology, not fact. Being Indian or Jewish is a legacy of my past; I don’t categorize myself as such. Every artist embarks on a poetic journey that leads beyond the places of their origins.”
Anish Kapoor
“It is breath that connects us to the universe,” says Anish Kapoor, drawing on various religions and traditions and using them freely in an absolute language that speaks to all of humanity without religious or ethnic boundaries.
Space, form, and matter are vehicles for spiritual reflection detached from specific religions.
By manipulating them, experiences are created that transcend the physical realm and lead the viewer to a deeper understanding of themselves and the universe.
It is the universal human being, who goes beyond words, culture, religions, and ethnicities. It is therefore not a search for a god but for the deep connection between human beings and the universe.
“Emptiness is a place, something we can enter into a relationship with.”
Anish Kapoor
His works are experienced rather than explained. The body is involved in space, sight is deceived, one gets lost in reflections and distortions. There is no need for words, but rather a pre-linguistic experience that touches the most ancestral part of us.
The invisible, transformation, non-religious sacredness are deeply contemporary themes, exploring the search for oneself and the movement of time and space.
The themes are totally universal: birth, death, emptiness, absence, infinity.
Who we are, what we feel, how we proceed, what we know about ourselves.
“I’m not interested in making things that you can just look at. I want to make things that look at you.” Kapoor says, but also, “Inner space is sacred space.”
Anish Kapoor’s art is rooted in the space between what we see and what we think we know, and viewing his works is never passive, but pushes us beyond appearances, deeper into the world we perceive as real.
I invite you to watch an interesting documentary about him that will inspire you to seek out his works: “Under the skin: in Conversation with Anish Kapoor.” His thoughts, his life, his themes are explored in a long interview in Venice.
It is a precious opportunity to get closer to the heart of his poetics, where emptiness, color, and matter become tools for profound reflection on our way of perceiving the world.
Human fragility has within it the universality of the divine. Human beings are fragile and powerful. We ask ourselves: “Where was I before I was born? Where do I go after death?” Kapoor does not create answers, but questions that remain unanswered within us.
And in that space of doubt, Kapoor’s wonderful art explodes.
“On the wall of my studio are three words: disobey, disapprove, disavow. I try to apply them every day, that is, to be a rebellious bad boy.”
Anish Kapoor
*In 2016, Anish Kapoor obtained exclusive rights to use Vantablack, sparking protests from artists such as Stuart Semple, who protested and created ultra-punk, ultra-blue, and black 3.0, banning Kapoor from selling it.
Kapoor responded by saying that Klein invented his blue and claimed it, so he can do the same.
