LONDON.- Anish Kapoor’s Untitled 2012 is one of the star lots at
Bonhams Postwar and Contemporary sale on July 1. Estimated at £400,000-600,000, the monumental convex disc is one of his signature mirrored works, with the stainless steel coated in a thin layer of magenta lacquer.
Reflecting whatever stands before it, Untitled 2012 distorts, mutates and twists the world around it, the shapes that it holds moving and turning as the viewer approaches or retreats. As a pure concave surface, the work also picks up sound from all over the room and bounces it out from the centre, and producing an echo.
Kapoor’s instantly recognizable, circular mirrored works have made the London-based artist a household name. Untitled 2012 is the climax of years of experimentation: the idea may be simple, but the execution is long, complicated and precise, and the results are complex and astounding.
In a 2011 interview, Kapoor said, ‘The mirroredness, in the right conditions, does something to dematerialise the object... they have to be made very well, and it has taken me too many years to make them well enough.’ To produce the right effect, the steel must be polished perfectly smooth, so that when staring in to the reflection, you cannot tell where the surface begins.
Francesca Gavin writes in Bonhams Magazine: ‘He is an artist whose work creates a sense of psychological disruption and the illusion of everlasting depth. Kapoor has made this mutable material truly his own.’
The artist's monumental public work Sky Mirror 2001 was ten years in the making from drawing board to completion. An even larger ten-metre version has since toured the world, being exhibited in the Rockefeller Centre, New York, the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg and Kensington Gardens, London.
Kapoor’s largest project to date was unveiled in the gardens of Versailles earlier this month, a series of monumental sculptures in the grounds including Sky Mirror alongside Dirty Corner, which attracted attention after being defaced by French royalists.
Anselm Kiefer, the subject of a solo show at the Royal Academy last year, is also represented in the sale. Estimated at £250,000-350,000, his Maria durch den Dornwald ging from 2005 was recently featured in two German exhibitions. The title of the work, the translation of which is ‘Mary went through the forest of thorns’, is an allusion to a German folk song. Kiefer, who often refers to German culture and history, uses dried flowers, earth and ash to reflect the lyrics’ themes of spiritual immortality in the face of death. He compares his use of media to alchemy, transforming object into subject.
Also in the sale are Andy Warhol’s 1982 Dollar Sign (estimated at £400,000-600,000), and Banksy’s Keep it Real (estimated at £40,000-60,000). The sale is currently on view at Bonhams New Bond Street.
