Sky Mirror

Kapoor's 'Sky Mirrors' are in many ways the opposite of his colourful pigment sculptures - the vertigo-inducing 'Voids' and the dark colourful 'holes' in space and material which he made in the late 1980s and early '90s. Hemispherical discs of polished steel, his 'Sky Mirrors' induce a similar sense of the void and of the immaterial by turning the logic of these earlier works on their head. A simple curved reflective surface, like giant silver contact lenses, the 'Sky Mirrors' seem to consist entirely of the reflective light around them, distorting it in such away that they make the material world of the viewer seem like an illusion.

Taking the sky-reflecting sculpture that David Smith pioneered with his Cubis in the 1960s to a minimal extreme, the 'Sky Mirrors' actually lose their own sense of material form and identity by seemingly dissolving into their surroundings and leaving only a warped ripple on the surface of reality. In this respect the 'Sky Mirrors' assert a deep sense of the immaterial in the same way that the apparently infinite voids invoked in Kapoor's pigment sculptures do and again come to seem like strange holes in reality or mysterious portals to another universe.

At close quarters the Sky Mirror embraces the viewer - reflecting their self-image at the centre of its disk while also appearing to suck into its reflective hemisphere all of their surroundings and in so doing, exposing phenomenal reality to be little more than a surface illusion radiating around them. Like a fish-eye lens the Sky Mirror presents the entire world in a bowl. Any movement on behalf of the viewer produces radical changes and distortions of light and surface that prompts a dizzying sense of disorientation and dislocation again akin to vertigo. Articulating in a new way the same confrontational themes between viewer and art object and between material and immaterial that permeate all of Kapoor's work, the Sky Mirror is not so much a 'hole in space' as a hole in what we know as phenomenal reality.