The Collector | Anish Kapoor: sculptures that explore space and mirrors

A five-day visit to Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock) in central Australia nearly 30 years ago gave British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor significant insight into his future work.

Interviewed for a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art, in Boston, in 2008, Kapoor said the rock was a place that was “fully formed, pure, essential, unencumbered by making”. As he walked the perimeter of the rock, “unbelievable things revealed themselves every day. I felt deeply connected with it, and with a kind of possible interpretation, a symbolic interpretation of the holes and the strips of stone that seem to be leaning against it.”

It was there that he envisaged a “white form on a white wall”, which resulted in his seminal work When I am Pregnant (1992). Kapoor constructed a rounded white protuberance emerging from a white wall. The bulge is undetectable when viewed from the front, but the contours of the form and surrounding space are revealed when seen at an angle.

Kapoor’s exploration of infinite space, originally experienced in When I am Pregnant, has progressed and further permutations can now be seen in his striking exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, in Central.

He continues to explore the notion of endless space, the void, as he pointed to in the Boston show, “The idea of place has always been very important to my work. A place that is, in a sense, original. I mean, by the word original, to do with ‘first’, and I think that is to do with centring oneself – allowing a thing to occur specifically rather than in general. A lot of my works are about passage, about a passing through, and that necessitates a place.”