Anish Kapoor's Art: Exploring the Void and the Blackest Black

Anish Kapoor can demand quite a lot from his audience. For some, gazing into dark whirlpools, into the blackest of black, may be unsettling, depending on one's state of mind. Added to that is dark red wax, one of his favorite materials: It symbolizes flesh and blood. Associations that cut straight to the core.

And yet, the artist seems cheerful and relaxed talking about his work. At times, however, it even makes him feel a little uneasy. Take, for example, the major exhibition of his work currently on view at the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg. In an interview with ARD, he walks around "First Body," a sculpture made of resin, and says: "It is, if you like, fleshy. Sort of doing this rather strange thing," he laughs, as his shoulders shudder.

One reason why Kapoor has such a visceral reaction to his own installations is probably because be begins working with the material without knowing how it will end up. "I go into the studio and say, 'I don't know what to do. I'm lost.' Then stuff arises and it's the thing in the room that you work with," he once told the magazine The Talks. "I'm really interested in that as a process because the process moves you in directions that you couldn't rationally put there."

Kapoor's art in Chicago and Munich

Born in 1954 in Bombay (today Mumbai), Anish Kapoor has long ranked among the world's best-known and most sought-after artists. He won the Turner Prize in 1991 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013. For more than 50 years, he has lived in London, and now the Hayward Gallery is dedicating a major exhibition to him.

Kapoor's artworks are on permanent display in many locations across the globe, where they blend seamlessly into both urban architecture and vast natural landscapes.

In Chicago, "Cloud Gate" (known locally as "The Bean") has graced the Millennium Park since 2006. It is a gigantic, bean-shaped stainless-steel sculpture that reflects the city's skyline.

Since 2020, "HOWL," a massive PVC sphere, has been installed in the rotunda of Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne. Kapoor said that its reddish-brown color refers to menstrual blood.

Speaking of red, Kapoor says it fascinates him. "It has a frightening kind of darkness in it," he said.

But Kapoor knows that things can get even darker. In 2016, he secured the exclusive rights to the blackest black ever created: Vantablack.

Originally developed for military purposes using nanotechnology, this intensely black material absorbs approximately 99.6% of incoming light. Since the eye cannot perceive what little light is reflected, objects that are coated with it appear to lose all texture, wrinkles or contours. Viewers are left with the impression of a two-dimensional, infinitely deep hole in space. "It's as dark as you can imagine, so dark that you lose your sense of who you are and where you are and especially your sense of time," the artist told BBC Arts in 2016.

An accidental fall into the abyss

In 2018, Kapoor's playful use of this deceptive black material led to a mishap for a visitor to the Serralves Museum in Porto: convinced that the black surface in front of him was solid, the visitor to the exhibition stepped into the void and fell two and a half meters, landing on the surface coated with Vantablack. "Descent into Limbo" was the evocative title of the work. The man suffered only minor injuries.

The void has long been a central theme in Kapoor's work. In Western philosophy, the concept of "the void" is often defined as something lacking, but Kapoor's conception is strongly influenced by Eastern philosophy, especially Hinduism and Buddhism. For Kapoor, the void is the origin of everything, an infinite space full of possibilities, promises and unborn forms.

Instagram can't capture it

While one shouldn't literally allow oneself to fall into the void the way the man in Portugal did, Kapoor does intend for viewers to experience a sense of vertigo or falling.

Speaking at an exhibition at London's Tate Modern, Kapoor once said that he had created works that embodied the act of falling: "But that falling doesn't have to be downwards. The falling in some curious way could also be towards a horizon or even upwards. Vertigo is at the center of this though — disorientation."

And so, while Anish Kapoor's works are indeed Instagrammable, just like those of many other successful contemporary artists, they are not always as easy to photograph as, say, Yayoi Kusama or Jeff Koons' art. Their true power is revealed only when there is no smartphone separating the viewer's eye from the artwork.

The Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg is exhibiting Anish Kapoor's work through August 30, 2026. His works are on view at the Hayward Gallery in London through October 18, 2026.