Anish Kapoor
Sculptor of the void.
Anish Kapoor makes sculptures that reflect or swallow light, such as Cloud Gate in Chicago.
Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Bombay, now Mumbai, in India. His father was a Hindu hydrographer and his mother came from a Jewish family from Iraq. In the early 1970s he lived for a time in Israel. In 1973 he moved to London, where he studied at Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art. He has lived and worked in Britain ever since.
He became known around 1980 for sculptures covered in pure, dry pigment in strong colours such as red, yellow and blue. The powder also lies on the floor around the works, so that the forms seem to grow out of the colour. The series is connected to the heaps of pigment he had seen at markets and temples in India. Later he began working in stone, often with hollow forms resembling caves or openings into darkness.
In 1990 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, and in 1991 he won the Turner Prize. In 2002 he filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with Marsyas, a huge red membrane form. His best-known public work is Cloud Gate in Millennium Park in Chicago, unveiled in 2006. It is made of 168 welded stainless-steel plates polished into a seamless mirror. Chicagoans call it “The Bean”. In London he designed the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Kapoor works with voids, reflections and deep blackness. Concave mirrors turn the room upside down, and dark holes seem bottomless. He has also fired lumps of red wax from a cannon at a wall. In 2016 he acquired exclusive rights to the artistic use of the ultra-black material Vantablack, which provoked protests from other artists.
Kapoor was knighted in 2013. He is one of the best-known sculptors in the world, and his work unites the simple forms of Minimalism with questions about the body, space and the spiritual. His public sculptures have become popular gathering places and photo opportunities.