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"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, especially on concave surfaces."
- Anish Kapoor

Born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1954, Anish Kapoor travelled all over the country during his childhood. His father was a hydrographer in the Indian Navy and his mother belonged to a small... "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, especially on concave surfaces."
- Anish Kapoor

Born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1954, Anish Kapoor travelled all over the country during his childhood. His father was a hydrographer in the Indian Navy and his mother belonged to a small Baghdadi Jewish community, allowing Kapoor access to a heritage whose origins could be traced back fifteen generations. After his initial schooling at the Doon School in Dehradun, Kapoor and one of his brothers, went to Israel in 1970, first to live on a kibbutz and later to study engineering. Within ten months he had dropped out of the university to pursue art. By 1973, Kapoor had moved to London to join the Hornsey College of Art, and later the Chelsea School of Art. He had his first show at the New Sculpture group exhibition at London's Hayward Gallery in 1978.

The following year, Kapoor returned to India. This trip was a life-changing experience and fuelled the first of his major art series, 1000 Names. Struck by the bright pigmented powders used in temples, in shrines where worshippers smeared the deity with vermillion, and arranged in piles throughout local Indian markets, Kapoor created fantastical geometric sculptures coated with the same thick powdery substance, in solid colours of red, yellow, blue, black and white. Their multi-hued juxtaposition and origins in Kapoor's Indian roots were, according to critic David Anfam, "among the most original catalyst involving homecoming and memory" and addressed "the polarities that [Kapoor] realized were pivotal to its ancient culture". (David Anfam, To Fathom the Abyss, p. 92)

By 1982, Kapoor was represented by London's Lisson Gallery, and subsumed in an emerging movement that came to be known as New British Sculpture. The same year he was chosen artist-in-residence by the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. According to New York Times critic Roberta Smith, Kapoor's sensibility, when compared to the Young British Artists of the 1990s, was "...markedly different; he greatly prefers gentle seduction to shock tactics. His sculpture is in many ways one long ode to the modernist monochrome and its emphasis on purity and perception, enacted in a three-dimensional space. It carves, colors and complicates space in different ways, adding interactive aspects and pushing that purity back and forth between votive and technological, East and West." ("The Sculptor as Magician", The New York Times, 30 May 2008, pp. E25, E27)

In the next two decades, Kapoor's free-standing sculptures and grand installations garnered acclaim, particularly for his interrogation of concepts of matter and void. In his own words: "The void has many presences. Its presence as fear is towards the loss of self, from a non-object to non-self. The idea of being consumed by the object, or in the non-object, in the body, in the cave, in the womb, etc. I have always been drawn to notion of fear, towards a sensation of vertigo, of falling, of being pulled inwards. This is a notion of the sublime which reverses the picture of union with light." (Homi Bhabha and Anish Kapoor, "A Conversation", Anish Kapoor, Tel Aviv Museum of Art exhibition catalogue, p. 59)

The notion of the sublime, which dates back to 18th century philosophers Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, suggests an emotional response, a feeling of insignificance in the face of "nature's superior forces and the immeasurable dimensions of the universe". (Camiel Van Winkel, "On the Sublime in the Work of Anish Kapoor", Anish Kapoor, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 26 September - 11 December 2009, p. 168). The aesthetic experience of the sublime, according to Burke, contains "not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, or sort of tranquillity tinged with terror" when confronted with beauty. (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, London: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 123)

The Romantic idea of the sublime, however, is less evident in Kapoor's works. "...Kapoor aspires to a reversed version of sublimity, a variant that is not directed so much upward, towards a divine light, as downward, at the darkness of prehistoric or prenatal hollow, in which one is solely dependent on one's own resources... Kapoor's ultimate concern lies not with the effects themselves, but with bringing about a heightened sensibility on the part of the viewer, who suddenly becomes aware of losing his safe distance from the object of his observation." (Van Winkel, p. 168)

Kapoor's preoccupation with the void continued well into the 1990s and beyond, even as he expanded the material repertoire of his abstract sculptures, and experimented with stone, wax and highly reflective surfaces such as mirrors and stainless steel that created vision-distorting voids. Created in 2005, the present lot-with its concave shape and highly polished surface-is one of Kapoor's smaller works in his stainless steel series that challenge reality and visual perception, while transforming the space within.

The present lot has its roots in one of Kapoor's first large scale experiments with polished surfaces - Sky Mirror, a six-metre wide concave dish of polished stainless steel, weighing ten tonnes. Installed in Nottingham in 2001, this mirrored sculpture is angled upwards to the sky to reflect its constant, seasonal change. Since then it has been installed in the Kensington Gardens in London, the Rockefeller Center in New York, and the football stadium in Dallas.

In 2004, Kapoor was commissioned to create the massive Cloud Gate to be installed in Chicago's Millennium Park. The entire project took two years to complete and was finally unveiled in 2006. Shaped like a curved ellipse of polished steel-also nicknamed "The Bean"-this public sculpture resembled a giant drop of liquid mercury, and became an iconic legacy in the artist's career.

"By dint of a breathtakingly virtuosic command of size and finish - Cloud Gate consists of 168 stainless-steel, hand-rolled, hand-polished, plasma-welded plates that weigh 110 tonnes and cost around $23 million - these latter-day inversions of the camera obscura bring the heavens down to earth and catapult us into an airborne virtual realm." (David Anfam, To Fathom the Abyss, p. 104) Kapoor's contribution to public art continues, with Turning the World Upside Down, an hourglass shaped structure of polished steel in Jerusalem in 2010, and Orbit, a 376-foot tall sculpture at the Olympic Park in Stratford, London, in 2012. The following year, Kapoor was granted knighthood by the British government for his contribution to the field of visual arts.

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