Anish Kapoor

Sky Mirror (2006)

The ancient Greeks believed that one of the functions of art was to hold a mirror up to nature. The beauty of their plays and paintings rivaled that of the natural landscape and reflected the perfection of the visible world. In the Renaissance, the duties of art shifted: One of its roles was to hold a mirror up to society, reflecting the complexities of human behavior to help audiences understand themselves in ways that might make the world a better place. Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror (2006) combines both of these goals, giving contemporary visitors to AT&T Stadium ever-changing views of the sky above and the ground below while inviting us to reflect on what it means to live in a global world.

Both down-to-earth and out-of-this-world, Kapoor’s stainless steel sculpture is a high-tech monolith and a low-tech monitor. Sky Mirror weighs 15 tons, stands three stories tall and measures more than 35 feet across its concave face. The highly polished disk takes visitors’ minds to Stonehenge, Egyptian pyramids, and Mayan temples as well as other structures prehistoric peoples constructed to mark the seasons. At the same time, Kapoor’s Minimalist sculpture functions as a huge, two-sided screen, or solar-powered monitor, on which visitors regard an endless, never-to-be-repeated drama. From one side, clouds, planes, birds and stars pass by in the sky, which itself changes from night to day. From the other side, individuals come together, in clusters and crowds, and disperse, moving on but never forgetting our connections to our surroundings and everything in them.