Anish Kapoor

A new addition to the Gallery's collection, by renowned British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor, is on display in the upper Asian gallery.

Untitled 2002 is a disc of stainless steel lacquered in a deep blood red often used by the artist to suggest bodily interiors, while recalling his Indian heritage (red is a strongly matriarchal colour in India). Its mysterious form has a concave surface and a mirror finish that confounds our perception of space and what is inside or out. Donated by Geoff Ainsworth AM through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program earlier this year, Untitled 2002 joins several other important works by Kapoor in the collection.

Void Field 1989 - purchased in 1990 using the Mervyn Horton Bequest Fund - is a very fine example of the 'New British Sculpture' Kapoor came to represent, along with Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley and others.

It initially appears as four deceptively simple blocks of Northumbrian sandstone. When you peer into the centre of each stone, there' s a deep velvety hole that seems, impossibly, to stretch to infinity.

The Gallery also owns a powerful 2001 suite of prints by Kapoor, Blackness from her womb. Here the artist, who often leaves meaning open in his works, refers directly to the womb. They are aquatints (a type of etching good for making complex tones, not just lines), a medium that allows Kapoor full expression of tonal variation and of the dynamic movement one might associate with life beginning within the body of another.