Anish Kapoor, Untitled, 2012

04 November 2025

Anish Kapoor’s Untitled (2012) is an embodiment of the artist’s enduring exploration of colour, void, and perception. Executed in fiberglass and paint, the work takes the form of a large concave hemisphere, its smooth interior painted a radiant magenta that seems to glow from within. The piece transforms the wall into a site of meditation, offering not a static form but a shifting, experiential encounter.

Kapoor has often described his artistic process as a dialogue between material and psyche, a kind of modern alchemy. “The physical process [of artmaking is] related to some internal process,” he explained, “the material that one’s working with—stone—and color, whatever else, coming to be a home for one’s psychological material… In the end, what one’s working with is oneself. Every piece of sculpture… is a kind of chemistry”[1]. This idea of transformation—where matter becomes a vessel for interior experience—animates this piece’squiet intensity.

The sculpture’s concave surface, perfectly smooth and devoid of any trace of the artist’s hand, exemplifies the post-minimalist sensibility that runs through Kapoor’s practice. The polished curvature and vivid colour create a perceptual field in which the boundaries between material and immaterial blur; the eye cannot quite locate depth or distance. Kapoor himself once observed: “The interesting thing about a polished surface to me is that when it is really perfect enough something happens—it literally ceases to be physical… What happens to concave surfaces is, in my view, completely beguiling”[2].

This artwork belongs to Kapoor’s celebrated body of monochrome and void sculptures, in which colour becomes a spatial and psychological phenomenon rather than a surface property. In this magenta hemisphere, the viewer is drawn into a sensorial experience that transcends objecthood; space folds inward, light is absorbed, and the work appears to vacillate between presence and absence.

Within the broader landscape of contemporary art, Kapoor’s Untitled (2012) situates itself between minimalism’s formal restraint and a metaphysical search for the sublime. Like much of his oeuvre, it transforms the act of seeing into a state of contemplation. The result is both intimate and infinite—a luminous void that invites the viewer not to look at, but to enter, and in doing so, to encounter the depths of perception itself.

This artwork will be feature in the exhibition in the upcoming Opera Gallery Miami exhibiton 'In Dialogue with Color: Mid-20th Century to Now' runnining from 30 November to 5 January 2026.