"One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?"
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Kapoor argues that spirituality in art cannot be willed into existence. Set out to make something spiritual and you risk sentimentality, cliche, or propaganda. The problem is not only intention but language: for centuries, religious traditions supplied a shared iconography that signaled transcendence. In a plural, secular, image-saturated culture, that vocabulary has dissolved. What would stand in for the halo, the mandorla, the temple threshold today? He suspects that any ready-made sign would feel hollow, a shortcut to depth.
When he asks whether the contemporary sign for the spiritual is some fuzzy space, he is both teasing and proposing a genuine puzzle. Much of his own work traffics in voids, reflective surfaces, and saturated color that unsettle the boundaries of the seen. Pigment mounds that seem to absorb light, mirrored ellipses that fold the viewer into an infinite elsewhere, cavities that are both object and absence: these are not illustrations of the beyond, but situations in which perception hesitates. That hesitation, that slipping of certainty, is where the possibility of the spiritual might arise.
The lineage runs through modern art that turned from depiction to experience: Rothko’s dissolving fields, Turrell’s rooms of light, Agnes Martin’s quiet grids. Rather than show the divine, they cultivate conditions for attention, stillness, or awe. Kapoor extends this by making matter behave as if it were immaterial. Industrial polish, engineered pigments, monumental scale become tools for producing precise ambiguity. The viewer completes the work; the body, the breath, the small vertigo at an edge do the symbolic labor that icons once performed.
So the task is not to encode spirituality, but to clear a space where it might be felt. The irony of the phrase fuzzy space is that the most resonant results come from rigor: exacting craft that yields indeterminacy. Spirituality, in this view, is not a theme but an event, arriving when an artwork releases itself from image into experience.
When he asks whether the contemporary sign for the spiritual is some fuzzy space, he is both teasing and proposing a genuine puzzle. Much of his own work traffics in voids, reflective surfaces, and saturated color that unsettle the boundaries of the seen. Pigment mounds that seem to absorb light, mirrored ellipses that fold the viewer into an infinite elsewhere, cavities that are both object and absence: these are not illustrations of the beyond, but situations in which perception hesitates. That hesitation, that slipping of certainty, is where the possibility of the spiritual might arise.
The lineage runs through modern art that turned from depiction to experience: Rothko’s dissolving fields, Turrell’s rooms of light, Agnes Martin’s quiet grids. Rather than show the divine, they cultivate conditions for attention, stillness, or awe. Kapoor extends this by making matter behave as if it were immaterial. Industrial polish, engineered pigments, monumental scale become tools for producing precise ambiguity. The viewer completes the work; the body, the breath, the small vertigo at an edge do the symbolic labor that icons once performed.
So the task is not to encode spirituality, but to clear a space where it might be felt. The irony of the phrase fuzzy space is that the most resonant results come from rigor: exacting craft that yields indeterminacy. Spirituality, in this view, is not a theme but an event, arriving when an artwork releases itself from image into experience.
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| Topic | Art |
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