allow the works their full expression. The fact that Kapoor’s work is concerned with the nature of space, and the manner in which objects (or absences) define the spaces around them, is given an advantageous setting in the entrance hall because the dark walls make the space in the entrance hall, its boundaries or edges, hard to define, or to seem to recede. In the entrance hall, the frame, contrary to what the word suggests, is almost without borders. (Kapoor is known for his fascination with black, and, interestingly, has the exclusive artistic rights to the world’s blackest pigment, a substance known as Vantablack.)
Architect Frederic Berthier says that, apart from stripping away a 1980s alteration to the apartment and restoring its classic Parisian character and proportions, he saw his task as creating an architectural “frame” for his clients’ art collection. The entrance hall of this apartment in Saint Germain des Pres in Paris, is designed specifically to display the owner’s series of acrylic Anish Kapoor “Space as an Object” sculptures. The walls are clad in a very dark, gloss-sealed wood, allowing the luminosity of the frozen, trapped air bubbles their maximum effect. Light is central to these works, and the darkened walls—the opposite of the “white cube” of the archetypal gallery—
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