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Lot Essay
'Void is really a state within. It has a lot to do with fear, in Oedipal terms, but more so with darkness. There is nothing so black as the black within. No blackness is as black as that. I am also aware that phenomenological experience on its own is insufficient. I find myself coming back to the idea of narrative without storytelling, to that which allows one to bring in psychology, fear, death and love in as direct a way as possible. This void is not something which is of no utterance. It is a potential space, not a non-space' (Anish Kapoor cited in Germano Celant, Anish Kapoor, Milan, 1998, pp. XXIX-XXX).
Goddess (Void) is one of a series of 'Voids' which Anish Kapoor made in the late 1980s and early '90s. These works which are hemispherical vortexes of rich deep pigmented colour seemingly disappearing into infinity are deliberately intended to instil an almost mystical sense of vertigo within the viewer. Gazing into the dark, sensual and immaterial voids of these material sculptures infuses the viewer with a direct experience of the void solely through the sensual medium of pure colour. Kapoor's aim with these works is to awaken in the viewer an awareness of immateriality through their own inner experience and even vertiginous desire for it. In this sense these works are like existential portals, strange meeting points between the immaterial and material worlds, between the viewer's innate sense of self and of infinity and nothingness.
In this respect the viewer as a material living entity, stands on one side of this divide confronting a mystical void leading to an unknown other. In works such as Madonna of 1989-90 and Goddess, the vaginal shape of the hemisphere makes this allusion more plain hinting at the process of birth as another mystical dividing line between material and immaterial worlds while also invoking a sense of the sacred feminine.
'The idea' with these works, Kapoor has said, 'is to make an object which is not an object, to make a hole in the space, to make something which actually does not exist' (Ibid).
Goddess (Void) is one of a series of 'Voids' which Anish Kapoor made in the late 1980s and early '90s. These works which are hemispherical vortexes of rich deep pigmented colour seemingly disappearing into infinity are deliberately intended to instil an almost mystical sense of vertigo within the viewer. Gazing into the dark, sensual and immaterial voids of these material sculptures infuses the viewer with a direct experience of the void solely through the sensual medium of pure colour. Kapoor's aim with these works is to awaken in the viewer an awareness of immateriality through their own inner experience and even vertiginous desire for it. In this sense these works are like existential portals, strange meeting points between the immaterial and material worlds, between the viewer's innate sense of self and of infinity and nothingness.
In this respect the viewer as a material living entity, stands on one side of this divide confronting a mystical void leading to an unknown other. In works such as Madonna of 1989-90 and Goddess, the vaginal shape of the hemisphere makes this allusion more plain hinting at the process of birth as another mystical dividing line between material and immaterial worlds while also invoking a sense of the sacred feminine.
'The idea' with these works, Kapoor has said, 'is to make an object which is not an object, to make a hole in the space, to make something which actually does not exist' (Ibid).