Descension

Anish Kapoor’s sculptures confuse the boundary between the space of the object and the space of the viewer. His early pigment works titled 1000 Names (1979-80), seem to emerge half formed from the floors and walls of the gallery. From interventions in architecture to the construction of works that fill, distort or disrupt the space they inhabit, Kapoor began to think of emptiness as the concrete state of objects.

He has explored this language of emptiness, of form and formlessness, throughout his work in the last 40 years. Kapoor’s objects sit uneasily and have unstable boundaries; between interior and exterior, between object and non-object.

Descension (2014), a water-vortex Kapoor is exhibiting at the Biennale, follows from a language of form that the artist first began to explore in the work Descent into Limbo, exhibited at documenta IX 1992— a cuboid building that contained a circular void in the floor descending into complete darkness.

Descension destabilises our experience of the solidity of the ground we stand on. It builds on Kapoor’s concern with non-objects and with auto-generated form. In its state of flux and motion, Descension confronts us with a perpetual force and a downward pull into an unknowable interior.