Anish Kapoor To Debut New Series Of World’s ‘Blackest’ Sculptures
Images via Ekaterina Bykova / Shutterstock.com and Vogler / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Anish Kapoor, artist and exclusive owner of the apparent “blackest material in the universe,” is poised to unveil a new series of artworks created using Vantablack S-VIS at the Galléria dell’Academia during Venice Biennale in 2021.
The creations are all covered in a “nano-material” that traps 99.96% light, making them appear completely void of dimension. Kapoor’s version of Vantablack comes in sprayable form.
Moving the nearly pitch-black sculptures will be a challenge, as they cannot be touched by human hands. To protect them, they are presently being kept in transparent plastic boxes, per The Art Newspaper.
Kapoor famously faced controversy for obtaining exclusive rights to the pigment. Outraged, British artist Stuart Semple invented the “most pigmented, flattest, mattest black acrylic paint in the world” to make a suitable shade available to the masses. Its visual effect is close to Vantablack’s, and absorbs between 98-percent and 99-percent of visible light. In addition, while Kapoor’s pigment has to be handled with assistance in a lab, Semple’s “open-source” variation works just like ordinary acrylic paint.
Addressing creators’ disdain, Kapoor explained that the pigment “does not come out of a tube,” and requires a complex process to be applied in art.
“The particles stand up like velvet when they are put to a reactor,” Kapoor said in his London studio on Wednesday. “To give you a sense of scale if the particle were one meter-wide (3.3-feet-wide) it would be 300 meters-tall (984 feet-tall). When the particles stand up next to each other, light gets trapped in between each particle,” he furthered.
Kapoor personally doesn’t fully understand how the pigment works with the reactor, as its functionality has been kept a secret for military and defense purposes.
Greg Hilty, curatorial director of Kapoor’s representative Lisson Gallery, said the showcase will also feature the renowned “void” artworks washed in blue and red.
[via The Art Newspaper, images via various sources]
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