! Anish Kapoor : Making Emptiness

Art work by Anish Kapoor

drawing by Anish Kapoor

!

The important thing is that at a given moment one arrives at illusion. Around it one finds a sensitive spot, a lesion, a locus of pain, a point of reversal of the whole of history, insofar as it is the history of art and insofar as we are implicated in it; that point concerns the notion that the illusion of space is different from the creation of emptiness.

Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive?  I think it's my role as an artist to bring to expression, it's not my role to be expressive. I've got nothing particular to say, I don't have any message to give anyone. But it is my role to bring to expression, let's say, to define means that allow phenomenological and other perceptions which one might use, one might work with, and then move towards a poetic existence.

--Anish Kapoor

In anish kapoor's work, you can easily find that the presence of an object can render a space more empty than mere vacancy could ever envisage, including this quality of an excessive, engendering emptiness...these are everywhere and visible.

How can the conceptual void be made visible? how can the perceptual void be spoken?Kapoor's sense of making the void more empty is the process by which the artist's reach exceeds cloying grasp of 'personality', refusing to allow the source of the work – its originality or identity – to rest in the shallow signature of style.

Kapoor says: I believe very deeply that works of art, or let's say things in the world, not just works of art, can be truly made. If they are truly made, in the sense of possessing themselves, then they are beautiful. If they are not truly made, the eye is a very quick and very good instrument… . The idea of the truly made does not only have to do with truth. It has to do with the meeting of material and non-material… .thing exists in the world because it has mythological, psychological and philosophical coherence. That is when a thing is truly made…