Pigment powder, which stands out as a material in Anish Kapoor’s early work, is the most defining element of the dense materiality he persistently adopts. This material, which lends corporeality to sculpture through its dense, saturated pigmentary effect, appeals to him for its dimension-giving quality as well as for the depth effect it produces on the surfaces it is plastered onto or coated with. Yet the mirror sculptures that proliferated in the 1990s and appeared before us as a magnificent design event are a serious alternative to this self-shaping material preference. For instance, the attempt we encounter in Islamic Mirror to invert the image through a determined engineering effort, or the artist’s search for a manipulative, multi-part arrangement that over time unsettles the effective visuality of optical illusion possibilities, exemplifies his clear departure from design perfection and the minimalist axis. Similarly, Kapoor’s interest in waste material, which he turned to in the 2000s, can likewise be characterized as a deviation occurring in continuation of the earlier pigment-related process. In recent years, it is evident that the giant masses, resembling a blood-paint compound and taking the form of waste material, have evolved into an increasingly extreme and radicalized dimension.

the spatial context of an event of abjection

The dedication of Kapoor’s artistic practice to a process we might define as dark matter, one that displaces the paint-like density of pigment, or purity itself, evolving it into a blood clot and a heap of waste, constitutes a clear attempt to cancel order and regularity. This shift, which drew particular attention with Shooting into the Corner, integrates with expressionistic gestures and transient effects through a spontaneity generated by the splattering of dirty material onto the surroundings, the wall, and the space. In this way, it partly allows the work to be read alongside cultural connections and references that proceed through the abject associations of the variable waste material and through discussions of body, presence, and absence.

The anti-visual context of this process of change, in the practices carried through to recent years, virtually demands that the coagulated massiveness of bloody waste be realized at large scale and heavy tonnage. Svayambhu, an important example of this development, is a giant mobile mass that, through spatial passage across its several different versions, both loses and regains its formal character. Likewise, in the inversely constructed mountain peak of the 2022 work Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto, this time it is positioned, in the form of a giant horizontal red mass made of fiberglass and paint, overflowing into the space it occupies. Kapoor does not clearly disclose the references he considers in forming these fabricated masses. Moreover, it can be said that he also leaves in shadow the connections to mixed cultural accumulation, religious mythology, or mystical rituals.

One could even think that Kapoor’s material interest, the new expressive possibilities achieved through material, and an intensifying plasticity, attract him all the more. It is as if he is more concerned with a dark, negative dimensioning, or with establishing an installational apparatus bound up with a disturbing event of abjection. It also seems plausible that this situation might represent a psychological rupture reached with Cloud Gate, and that the image deformation forming beneath that giant metal form may have drawn him toward this exciting change. Similarly, the giant PVC covering encountered in examples such as Marsyas, Ark Nova, Leviathan, and most recently All of Nothing, along with the cell membrane and tissue it emulates and the bodily organism it evokes, likewise draws Kapoor toward a darkness that produces the suffocation and stomach-clenching sensations dominating the gloomy halls of the Palazzo Manfrin. The cold, bloody dark mass is, as it were, the earthly burden of inner distress…

If we look closely, what takes bodily form here is a sediment produced by psychological and historical processes, one identified with red and purple and directly evoking a residue decayed with blood. Consequently, this mass, occupying the threshold between skin and flesh, used as raw material in Kapoor’s major, large-scale works, completes an imagistic dark-landscape, functioning as the fundamental object of a new visual ideology, as a geological stratum, and as a compressed, universal waste. Here, the residue, mud, and blood seepage, scattered about within the category of the abject and serving as a unit or measure of thought derived from earthly waste, unquestionably possesses, to an ample degree, the power to generate extraordinary negative emotions, as well as the capacity to connect, in equal measure, to a mournful density of thought and to human stories.