Anish Kapoor is known for creating sculptures with extraordinary surfaces that pull viewers in, encouraging close looking. Varying widely in scale and incorporating materials from stone and earth to silicone and PVC, his work combines formal precision with innovative engineering and a precise use of optics and reflectivity.

In Untitled (2012), part of a larger group of mirrored works by the artist, Kapoor uses highly polished stainless steel on an enormous scale, distorting and transforming reflections of the work’s surroundings. Kapoor has characterized his mirrored surfaces as dynamic objects, observing that “they seem to be active, to be in various states of becoming.”

The reflective, concave surface of Untitled seems to absorb us into its space. From some vantage points, the work confronts us with a displaced, splintered vision of ourselves, while other focal points eliminate the viewer’s reflection entirely. The round, concave shape also creates peculiar sonic effects, amplifying and altering the observer’s perception of the sounds in the gallery space, similar to the way that a curved mirror inside a telescope focuses rays of light.

Kapoor’s interest in the relationship between light and the viewer’s perception is shared by James Turrell, whose long-term installations are also on view in the museum’s Robert W. Wilson Building 6. While Turrell tightly controls the light in his installations, however — as well as the mode by which it enters – the mirrored surface of Kapoor’s Untitled engages the building’s existing architecture and abundance of natural light. Intervening in our perception of the space, Untitled turns it unfamiliar and strange.

Untitled, 2012
Stainless steel
Private collection, courtesy of McCabe Fine Art, Sweden