Anish Kapoor, "Untitled", 2002

Presence versus absence, materiality versus absence, tangibility versus immateriality, chaos versus order: Anish Kapoor's work is full of apparent contradictions and dualities. The results are "voids", or objects that are not objects, "something that actually does not exist". By working a massive black granite monolith, he gives meaning to the unique essence and transformative qualities of the material, creating an indefinable narrative sequence from the stone's history. The geometric, polished, and diffusely inverted reflective surface in which the artist's hand cannot be seen contrasts with the raw materiality of the stone's edges. As Kapoor stated: "at the end of the process... the stone becomes something else, becomes light, becomes a proposition."

Since the early 1990s, Kapoor has been working on sculptures that depict transitional spaces, in-between spaces, and the endless vacuum, in granite or Belgian black stone, limestone, marble, and reflective stainless steel. Sculptures such as these also exist with several polished, concave cavities, as in the garden of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.