You'd think giving birth would be easy. And it's no wonder I've never given a woman an orgasm.

Anish Kapoor Gets Exclusive Rights to the World’s Darkest PigmentL

Anish Kapoor now owns the exclusive rights to the world’s darkest material — a claim that, naturally, is pissing off other artists. The pigment is the very sexy Vantablack, known as the blackest black out there — much blacker than a panther swimming in a tarpit, the Ayam Cemami, or your wardrobe during your middle school goth phase. A substance developed by scientists at Surrey NanoSystems in 2014, Vantablack essentially absorbs all light — 99.965% of radiation, to be exact; even when painted on a textured and shiny surface such as aluminum, it creates an abyss free of creases that many have compared to a black hole.

Kapoor had announced his intentions to use the substance shortly after its creation, but he evidently felt he had to do more and claim it as his own, in the process barring others from using it. According to the Daily Mail, the artist Christian Furr — largely known for being the youngest artist to paint the Queen of England — had intended to use the pigment in a series of paintings and has expressed his outrage at being restricted to using less intense blacks.

“I’ve never heard of an artist monopolizing a material,” Furr told the Daily Mail. “Using pure black in an artwork grounds it.

“All the best artists have had a thing for pure black – Turner, Manet, Goya,” he said. “This black is like dynamite in the art world. We should be able to use it. It isn’t right that it belongs to one man.”

Kapoor often plays with how we perceive the materiality of objects and has noted that his affinity for the world’s darkest material stems from its ability to disorient viewers.

“The nanostructure of Vantablack is so small that it virtually has no materiality,” he told Artforum. “It’s thinner than a coat of paint and rests on the liminal edge between an imagined thing and an actual one. It’s a physical thing that you cannot see, giving it a transcendent or even transcendental dimension, which I think is very compelling.”

Researchers over at Surrey NanoSystem are evidently big fans of Kapoor’s work; the company’s founder and chief technology officer, Ben Jensen, described his art as “infectious.”

“He has an amazing ability to see things that other people don’t and he’s famous for his work in reflections and voids,” Jensen told the New York Times in 2014. “We never imagined we would be involved in something like that, but his ideas are infectious, and my research scientists love that their work could be used this way.”

Any artists tempted to use the pigment anyway should be wary of the consequences: if news reaches Kapoor that someone is treading on his artistic territory, it would not be out of character for him to swiftly threaten to sue the offender.

hyperallergic.com/279243/anish-kapoor-gets-exclusive-rights-to-the-worlds-darkest-pigment/

This is ludicrous....

Lets face it, Kapoor's art is so bad he needs a gimmick.

I don't see how he can prevent other artists using this black if they get hold of it. Plus keeping dust off it will be hard and other particles that reflect light.

It could be possible to do a patent search to see if Kapoo has patented this black for use on art objects and then will refuse rights but I doubt it. Artists will ignore him anyway as by taking legal action against them Kapoor will just be giving them publicity like he does for that fat bloke from China. Who moans about being pursued in courts

Just use "UltraBlack"

"Scientists have fashioned what may be the blackest material in the universe: a sheet of carbon nanotubes that captures nearly every last photon of every wavelength of light.

The substance absorbs between 97 percent and 99 percent of wavelengths that can be directly measured or extrapolated. It’s the closest that scientists have yet come to a black body, a theorized state of perfect absorption whose closest analogue is believed to be the opening of a deep hole. "

www.wired.com/2009/03/ultrablack/

This all feels like a bit of advertising for Vantablack.

The British sculptor Anish Kapoor is known for expansive, architecure-scale works. Now he has the studio to match.

For the past 20 years, Kapoor has been creating sculptures from his studio in a converted dairy factory in south London. Take Cloudgate, Chicago's famed stainless steel "bean," which, at 42 feet long, weighs around 110 tons, and Memory, a Cor-Ten steel sculpture made up of 156 parts that weighs 24 tons (on the lighter side for Kapoor). When the artist installed the nearly 500 foot-long, 10-story Marsyas in the Tate in 2003, the Guardian called it "the biggest sculpture at Tate Modern and probably the biggest in any art gallery in the world."

Five years ago, Kapoor approached architect Michael Casey of London-based studio Caseyfierro about renovating his studio as well as the buildings he had purchased next door, which altogether take up an entire city block. At the time, Casey says, the space was still in its raw, original form: a typical 1950s tin-roof building with no insulation, a rudimentary heating system, and glazed-over windows offering little natural light. "I thought we should make it into an in-between space between a studio where you work and something with the qualities of a gallery space."

Casey wanted to upgrade the space to be more functional and comfortable, but he also had to take into consideration the particularities of Kapoor's extensive design and fabrication process. How do you design for such huge, unwieldy works of art?

They key, he says, was creating workspaces that are flexible to different aspects of Kapoor's process. "As an architect you think about the whole process, and at first we thought let’s make it one big span and you can do anything you want," says Casey. "But then we realized that each work is its own process and each has its own materials and some material can’t even be in the same room as another." For example, Kapoor and his collaborators might be polishing a piece or creating a bonding agent—"a mucky, dirty grimy existence," says Casey—for one piece, while another team is simultaneously creating an architectural model of an exhibition space. Each of those processes is better off with its own sectioned-off space.

The solution was to divide the spaces up into multiple studios and renovate them one at a time—a process that ended up taking five years to complete. The architects started with the old dairy factory at the north end of the street, dividing it into three separate studios. They removed first floor to create a space with 30-foot ceilings and gave the walls a fresh coat of white paint. Clerestory windows that span the entire length of the building's north side bring in plenty of light from overhead.

The second phase was to build three smaller studios in the buildings next door. In one, the architects restored an exposed steel I-beam structure from which Kapoor could suspend large sculptures (per his brief, the beam needed to support 3 tons of weight). In the other spaces, the architects converted a mezzanine for laying out maquettes and a gallery-like space for testing different exhibition environments. In the previous space, Casey says, the artists would have to create the largest works in separate pieces that couldn't be put together until they arrived at the exhibition space. Now they have the volume to construct it in full and set it up as it would be in a gallery.

After five years of off-and-on construction to comply with Kapoor's schedule, the spaces were completed in October 2015. Casey describes the construction process as "very incremental," but says it gave his team time to consider what each next space needed to accomplish and learn from the construction of the last. "From the building we started out with to the one we ended on, they are all so different," he says. "It would have ended up a completely different studio if we had done them all at the same time."

www.fastcodesign.com/3059608/inside-artist-anish-kapoors-sprawling-new-studios/7

Excitingly, today the Museum Of Modern Art Oxford announced that in September this year Anish Kapoor will have an exhibition of paintings

www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/anish-kapoor-painting/

“A unique exhibition of paintings by Anish Kapoor ( b. 1954, Mumbai – lives and works in London, UK). Curated with the internationally celebrated artist, this show explores the paintings that have been an integral part of Kapoor’s studio practise.

The materiality of Kapoor’s substantial body of new works pushes the boundaries between sculpture and painting into visceral new ground. This is the second time Kapoor has exhibited at Modern Art Oxford, the first being his inclusion in India: Myth and Reality in 1982, which showed his seminal sculptural works.”

Great print for £50, numbered edition of only 100 on quite thick paper by the looks of it also, no brainer at that price! Biggest bargain in a while....

They came up early at around 11.40 then disappeared again so I guess a lot sold then.

Managed to get one when it went up early, great limited poster for bargain price, and no overlay text on it.

around noon Just saying........

I would say 20 minutes to midday is 'around' - sorry you missed it

I can make a blue blurry spot for you if you like....

I think this is overly simplistic, ignores the artist’s talent and contribution to culture, and is rather nonsensical when most were discussing a poster print that was contributed by the artist to a charity.