Anish Kapoor challenges perceptions in a mind-bending show at the ICA

The 14 large works on display in "Past, Present, Future" at the Institute of Contemporary Art include "Inwendig Volle Figur” (above). (Dave Morgan)

A gainst the rather dismissive definition of sculpture as something you bump into when you back away from a painting, Britain's Anish Kapoor proposes a new definition: sculpture as a kind of optical whirlpool, something that sucks you in and makes all your certainties vanish.

Kapoor is the subject of an entrancing new show at the Institute of Contemporary Art. It's the first museum survey of his work on the East Coast in 15 years, and as such, it's a coup for the ICA, which also hosted Kapoor's first museum show in America back in 1985.

This exhibition contains a mere 14 pieces displayed in just one large room. But unlike, say, the ICA's recent Louise Bourgeois show, it is in no way slight. The works are large and often complex - especially in logistical terms (installing some of these pieces must have been a real headache).

Kapoor delights in challenging perceptual certainties. I suspect he also gets a kick out of defying others (perhaps art critics in particular) to describe exactly what it is he does.

In most ways, his art is marvelously simple. His objects sit on the floor or hang from the wall with the kind of inscrutable reticence we recognize easily from years of exposure to Modernist art and design.

But they are disingenuous beasts. The clean contours of Kapoor's biomorphic shapes are constantly dissolving into optical fuzz. Again and again, they confound our attempts to see how they were made, how they are prevented from falling over, or where they begin and end.

All Kapoor's work triggers an urge to look closer, or to see the piece from different angles. Take one of the smallest and simplest pieces in the show, a 1992 work evocatively titled "When I Am Pregnant." It's nothing more than a white spherical bump protruding 1 1/2 feet from the gallery's white wall.

But as you reach a point directly in front of the bump, all its defining contours - so sharp from side on - simply disappear, and you find yourself looking at a sort of hazy smudge on the wall, an optical emanation, with no clear coordinates.

"I like the idea that all material has a kind of immaterial present," says Kapoor in an interview with the ICA's chief curator (and curator of this show) Nicholas Baume, published in the catalog. In front of Kapoor's works, it's not hard to grasp what he means. Despite his status as one of the world's preeminent sculptors, Kapoor's real knack is to make the many different materials he works with seem somehow other than sculptural.

Kapoor should not be unknown to American audiences. His 110-ton sculpture "Cloud Gate" - a giant bean shape made from curving reflective stainless steel - occupies a prominent place in Chicago's Millennium Park. And right now, his recent work is on display at Barbara Gladstone's two New York galleries.

The ICA show includes works made between 1979 and 2007. Each one is a unique and self-sufficient form, but they also combine marvelously. The pieces talk to and amplify and in some cases actually interact with one another.

Standing in the center of the ICA gallery, for instance, is a long S bend, reminiscent of some of Richard Serra's monumental works, but smaller and made from reflective stainless steel. As you walk by, you see all the other works in the gallery reflected with various degrees of distortion.

Of course, everyone loves a distorting mirror, but after the original delight wears off, something about the conceit (explored by Kapoor in dozens of other works, with various degrees of success) seems a little fey.

It's a reminder, perhaps, of how slippery, in aesthetic terms, Kapoor's favored strategies can be. Most serious sculptors run a mile from optical trickery and illusions. But Kapoor delights in his ability to find forms and materials that suggest something beyond the merely visible. For the most part, his touch is sure.

From the beginning of his career, color has played a crucial role. An early series called "1000 Names" (after the litany of names given by Hindus to their gods) was made when Kapoor returned from a trip to India after finishing art school. (He was born in Bombay to a Hindu father and Jewish-Iraqi mother; he moved to London in 1973.)

The series comprised various shapes covered in pigment. Some of it spread from the objects onto the floor, forming a kind of terrestrial halo. The shapes were suggested by the conical mounds of colored pigment Kapoor saw on the Indian subcontinent, but he pushed them in gradually more sophisticated directions.

Sometimes the pigment was genuine powder. Other times Kapoor was happy to embrace the illusion of powder: He would bind it with fluids and paint it onto his objects in layers. So already at this early stage, Kapoor was distancing himself from the Modernist credo of "truth to materials" and opting for degrees of illusion and trompe l'oeil.

One work from the "1000 Names" series on display here is a slender screw shape emerging from a flat rectangular plinth on the gallery floor. Covered in red pigment, it confronts you as a dramatic intrusion into the gallery space, the tip of some lugubrious machine powering away beneath, unearthing color of explosive intensity.

Color is treated by most sculptors (those who don't avoid it altogether) as either a skin on the surface of things or a quality indivisible from matter itself. Kapoor is different. More and more, he uses color to suggest the absence of matter, the void.

Look, for instance, at his wonderful wall piece "My Body Your Body." From afar, it looks like a monochrome painting in a deep saturated blue. But the color draws you closer, and as you approach, you realize that what looked like a mere patch of darker tone is in fact a cavity.

Up close, the cavity curves and becomes narrower as it extends into the space behind the wall. Where it ends is impossible to make out. The blue, meanwhile, is so intense that the volume seems to expand and contract as you change your angle of approach. The piece is deeply seductive; its sexual associations don't need spelling out.

Other artists before Kapoor have explored the link between color and spatial voids. Yves Klein patented his own color blue and reveled in its associations with the void. And America's own poet of light and space, James Turrell, has made great play with the ambiguities suggested by colored voids. But Kapoor has mined this terrain more convincingly and inventively than most.

He has always liked the idea of the pristine, self-generated object, the piece that hasn't been carved, cast, or assembled, but has simply come into being, innocent of human hands. But there is one work in this show that is far from pristine. It's more like sculpture as splatter.

Called "Past, Present, Future" (the same title as the show), it is in fact one quarter of a huge sphere connected to the wall and covered in gooey red wax. A long arm, arcing on its underside to be flush with the sphere, sweeps back and forth across its surface, like a windshield wiper in extreme slow motion. It smooths out the wax, pushing the residue against the wall, which accumulates a wonderful patina of splatter.

It's hard to say exactly why the work is so exciting. Playing with blood-colored goo in a pristine gallery setting carries an obvious appeal. But as I got close, I became utterly absorbed by the way the piled-up residue stretched and collapsed and tore as the arm moved back from the wall.

It may not have been what Kapoor intended, but for me, the whole process called to mind the pleasures of smoothing down cake mixture freshly poured into a tin. At any rate, it's one of the highlights of this mind-bending, and oftentimes ravishing show.

Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com