Anish Kapoor: Monadic Singularity at Liverpool Cathedral
Anish Kapoor is recognised for his large-scale sculptures and installations often in red and black, or otherwise formed in highly reflective stainless steel. The artist notes that ‘My tendency is to go from colour to darkness. Red has a very powerful blackness. This overt colour, this open and visually beckoning colour, also associates itself with a dark interior world.’ Colour and materiality have always been significant aspects of the artist’s practice (and sometimes a point of contention). The soaring enormity of Britain’s largest Cathedral, along with its significance and specificity of place, makes it an intriguing location for Kapoor’s work to be explored. The themes in Kapoor’s work - the immaterial and the body, the spiritual and the physical, substance and the void - are all heightened by the monumental, neo-Gothic setting of the Cathedral. Colours too, take on an additional layer of meaning when juxtaposed with the atmosphere and iconography of this place of worship.
Anish Kapoor - Untitled (2010) wax, steel, oil-based paint [detail]
Visitors are first confronted with a vast, uniformly and overwhelmingly red cube face. A funnel shape stretches inwards, inviting visitors into the hidden interior of the cube. Internally, Sectional Body preparing for Monadic Singularity is filled with more red; venous, membrane-like structures which glow in the otherwise dark blackness. It is easy to feel the connection between Kapoor’s work and the human body through these biomorphic shapes and colours. Although huge, the structure is dwarfed by the Cathedral, so it is also easy to understand the insignificance of the corporeal form.
The work also features several hollow cross-sectional structures to look through, including a red, marquise-shaped aperture which, in this context, is more than a little evocative of the wound of Christ. Through these spaces, visitors can contemplate one of Liverpool Cathedral’s many stained glass windows, offering a mindful way to explore how the internal architecture of the artwork interacts with the architecture of its surroundings.
Anish Kapoor - Sectional Body preparing tor Monadic Singularity (2018) PVC, steel
Moving eastward through the Cathedral, visitors next encounter Untitled, an (again, huge) bell-shaped structure made of Kapoor’s signature deep crimson-coloured wax. The wax is pushed continuously around and around the structure by a mechanical steel blade. This endless, slow, smooth movement coupled with the sanguine, thick, deep red wax - which smears and piles at the base of the work - make Untitled equal parts meditative and threatening. Here again, Kapoor uses the vivid, evocative connotations of red to elicit thoughts of physicality and mortality.
Anish Kapoor - Untitled (2010) wax, steel, oil-based paint
If Kapoor’s symbolic use of colour can evoke ideas of the body and of mortality, then the opposite can be said for the absence of colour. The third work visitors arrive at, Spire, is a concave cornet shape which narrows into a fine point towards the Cathedral’s ceiling. Spire is made from highly reflective stainless steel, which inverts and reflects its surroundings. Kapoor refers to his mirror works as ‘non-objects’ and in this way we can also think of them as being a ‘non-colour’. Their surfaces are always shifting to take on the inverted image of what surrounds them - in this case reflecting back the architecture and palette of the Cathedral. One of Kapoor’s oft-revisited subjects is ‘the void’ - what is meant by this is open to interpretation, but Spire’s lack of colour, lack of fixed identity and appearance, along with its skywards point, suggest something unknowable, immaterial and beyond ourselves.
Anish Kapoor - Spire (2014) stainless steel
Kapoor’s paintings Red Haze and Covered, built up with layers of silicone, paint and gauze on canvas, are unfortunately situated a little too high up to engage with properly. Even from a subpar vantage point, this pair of textural paintings still manage to draw out a visceral response through their fleshy, injured appearance. Red Haze is a field of pulsing, bodily red and the mottled black-red of Covered gives it a bruised quality. However, both works are hung either side of the Cathedral’s high altar and are as such, literally outshone by it. The focal point of the Eastern end of the Cathedral is filled with ornate, devotional detail coloured in gold intended to symbolise divinity and light, against a backdrop of enormous, jewel-toned stained glass windows filled with religious iconography. This overt, colourful and moving display of worshipfulness overpowers Kapoor’s dramatic yet limited colour palette.
Anish Kapoor - Red Haze and Covered (2018) silicone
