Sky Mirror (for Hendrik)

De Pont Museum has a tradition of pursuing long-term collaborations with the artists whose work it collects and displays. From the early 1990s, the first director of De Pont, Hendrik Driessen, gave Anish Kapoor a prominent place in the museum. Sky Mirror (for Hendrik) (2017) – almost a ‘little brother’ to Vertigo from 2008 – was created to mark De Pont’s 25th anniversary. It is an homage to both Driessen and the long-term connection between the artist and the museum.

The sculpture belongs to Kapoor’s Sky Mirrors series: monumental, reflective sculptures that have been installed in various places around the world since 2006. For Tilburg, the artist chose a rectangular shape for the first time. The sheet of stainless steel, six and a half metres tall and only four centimetres thick, was fabricated in Groningen and then spent two months in London being polished to a high shine.

The mirror stands at a 30-degree angle above a round brick-paved pond designed by the English garden designer Sophie Walker. While the water garden keeps visitors at a distance, it also reinforces the experience of space and reflection. Kapoor himself likened the work to a ‘freestanding painting’, like the cloudy skies captured by English landscape painter John Constable. During preparations, Kapoor said, ‘I hope that it brings heaven to earth. A bit of paradise.’

The mirror captures the ever-changing tableau of skies, clouds, greenery and buildings surrounding the museum. Its slight curve distorts the reflections, causing reality and illusion to merge into one another. The result is a living image in which light, water, and space come together, and in which the viewer involuntarily realizes that they are part of something much larger.

Sky Mirror (for Hendrik) was made possible in part by contributions from the artist and the museum, as well as a joint gift from the city of Tilburg, Brabant C, private benefactors and corporate donors Van Spaendonck, Interpolis, Rabobank, VolkerWessels and Jacques de Leeuw.