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Lot Essay
"Mother as a Ship" is a prime example from the series of wall pigment works that Kapoor began in 1989. While the artist had been working with this material since the late 70s, it is in this year that he began to work with large-scale sculptures. In his own words: "An essential issue in my work is that the scale always relates to the body. In the pigment works...a sense of place was generated between objects. This place has now moved inside the object so it has been necessary to change the scale. The place within is a mind/body space. A shrine for a person."
In this work Kapoor takes the spectator through a visual and intellectual experience, a search for the inside and the outside, spirit and matter. The large cavity in "Mother as a Ship" opens up a view into an un-defined space characterised only by the deep blue of the dry pigment; here, one could believe that the infinite void of the cavity is contained on the other side of the finite space of the wall. Germano Celant writes about a related work, "Madonna" of 1989-90, commenting that its "monumental and architectural proportions make it loom over anyone who approaches... To allow for the epiphanic re-absorption of the human by the divine, these works turn the void outward. The enormous mass of blue, and the object's concave shape, create a kind of vertical abyss, capturing energy and pulling in the oberver's gaze, if not his entire body." (G. Celant, "Anish Kapoor", Milan 1996). In Kapoor's words, the idea is "to make an object which is not an object, to make a hole in the space, to make some thing which actually does not exist." (op. cit.)
In this work Kapoor takes the spectator through a visual and intellectual experience, a search for the inside and the outside, spirit and matter. The large cavity in "Mother as a Ship" opens up a view into an un-defined space characterised only by the deep blue of the dry pigment; here, one could believe that the infinite void of the cavity is contained on the other side of the finite space of the wall. Germano Celant writes about a related work, "Madonna" of 1989-90, commenting that its "monumental and architectural proportions make it loom over anyone who approaches... To allow for the epiphanic re-absorption of the human by the divine, these works turn the void outward. The enormous mass of blue, and the object's concave shape, create a kind of vertical abyss, capturing energy and pulling in the oberver's gaze, if not his entire body." (G. Celant, "Anish Kapoor", Milan 1996). In Kapoor's words, the idea is "to make an object which is not an object, to make a hole in the space, to make some thing which actually does not exist." (op. cit.)