Tall Tree and the Eye
Anish Kapoor (born 1954) · 2009
Seventy three mirrored spheres climb into the air beside the river, stacked on three hidden columns so that they seem to hang together by magic. Each ball is a metre across and polished like a bearing, and every one reflects the titanium museum, the sky, the water and you, over and over, upside down and stretched. Walk slowly around it and the reflections slide across the surfaces in different directions at once. On a bright day it almost disappears into the sky; on a grey one it looks like a column of mercury.
Anish Kapoor has worked with mirrored steel for years, in the great bean shaped Cloud Gate in Chicago and in concave discs that swallow whole rooms, and the point is always the same: to make an object that is more absence than presence, a thing that shows you everything except itself. Here the spheres also fragment the museum behind them into dozens of small curved pictures, so that Gehry's building becomes raw material for another artist. Look for the places where two balls reflect each other and the image tunnels away into infinity.
The title comes from a poem by Rilke, and Kapoor has said the work is about growth and vision, a tree of eyes. It was first shown at the Royal Academy in London in two thousand and nine and the museum acquired it soon after for its collection, placing it where the tower of the building and the Salve bridge frame it. Many visitors miss it, because it sits on the river side rather than the entrance side, so take the path that leads round past the Bourgeois spider and the reflecting pool and you will find it.
Did You Know? Every sphere is a slightly different mirror, so if you look for your own face you will find it repeated seventy three times in seventy three different sizes.
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