Anish Kapoor at Lisson Gallery in New York, and a darkness that seems to have no floor.

Anish Kapoor’s exhibition across Lisson Gallery’s two New York spaces ran from November 2 to December 16, 2023. It was the first time his Vantablack paintings had been shown in the city.

The paintings are made with Vantablack, a nanomaterial that absorbs 99.965 per cent of visible light. In person the effect is hard to describe. The surface stops reading as a surface; the eye looks for an edge and finds none.

The darkness is the point, not the trick. Kapoor has long worked between light and dark, presence and absence, and these paintings press that question as far as it can go: standing in front of one feels like looking into an opening rather than at an object.

Alongside them were new gouache drawings, in which forms that suggest both bodies and buildings gather and then dissolve into black. On paper the same concerns become softer and more intimate.

In the galleries the pairs Kapoor has always worked with, solid and empty, inside and out, felt unusually close together. The works do not explain themselves, and they ask for time.

What Vantablack gives him is a new way into the void, his oldest subject. The response it draws is mixed, part wonder and part unease, which is perhaps the honest response to an absence one can see.

Kapoor made his name with wax, steel, stone and pigment. Vantablack opens another chapter in the same long inquiry into how we see, and where sight gives out.

The exhibition was a fair measure of where his work has arrived: patient, exact, and still willing to unsettle the viewer.

PHOTOS A. SAKAE

Please note the colors in the photos may not accurately represent the true colors of the artworks. The photos have been processed for this publication.