Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor (born 12 March 1954) is a British sculptor born in India, among the most influential artists of his generation. His very large works in mirror-polished steel, stone, wax and pure pigment play with the viewer’s sense of space and emptiness. The best known is Cloud Gate, the reflecting sculpture in Chicago that visitors call “the Bean”.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Anish Mikhail Kapoor |
| Born | 12 March 1954, Bombay (Mumbai), India |
| Age | 72 |
| Nationality | British (born Indian) |
| Education | The Doon School, Dehradun; Hornsey College of Art; Chelsea School of Art, London |
| Occupation | Sculptor |
| Notable works | 1000 Names, Marsyas, Cloud Gate, Sky Mirror, Leviathan, ArcelorMittal Orbit, Descension |
| Awards | Turner Prize (1991), Praemium Imperiale (2011), Padma Bhushan (2012), knighthood (2013), Genesis Prize (2017) |
| Children | 3 |
Early Life
He was born in Bombay. His father, a Punjabi Hindu, was a hydrographer in the Indian Navy; his mother came from the Baghdadi Jewish community, the daughter of a cantor of the synagogue in Pune. He was educated at the Doon School in Dehradun.
At about seventeen he went with his brother to Israel and lived on a kibbutz, intending to study engineering. He found he had no gift for mathematics and decided to become an artist.
Education
He moved to London in 1973 and studied at Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art. He has lived in Britain ever since.
Career
Pigment
On a visit to India in 1979 he was struck by the mounds of coloured powder sold outside temples. Back in London he made 1000 Names, groups of simple forms covered in intense red, yellow and blue pigment that spilt on to the floor around them. They made his reputation.
Voids
In the later 1980s he began carving deep hollows into blocks of stone and coating the insides with dark pigment, so that the cavity looked like a hole into infinity. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990 and won the Turner Prize in 1991.
Mirrors and monuments
- Marsyas (2002): a red membrane 150 metres long, stretched through the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern
- Cloud Gate (2006): 110 tonnes of seamless polished steel in Millennium Park, Chicago, reflecting the skyline and the people walking under it
- Sky Mirror: a concave steel dish turned to the sky, shown in New York, London and elsewhere
- Svayambh and Shooting into the Corner: works in blood-red wax
- Leviathan (2011): a vast inflated chamber inside the Grand Palais in Paris
- ArcelorMittal Orbit (2012): a looping red steel tower 114 metres high, made for the London Olympic park with the engineer Cecil Balmond
- Descension: a whirlpool of black water sunk in the floor
A large retrospective of his work was shown at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and in a film studio in Mumbai in 2010.
Controversies
- **Vantablack:** in 2016 he acquired the exclusive right to use in art a coating described as the blackest material ever made. Other artists protested; one made a “pinkest pink” paint available to everyone in the world except Kapoor.
- **Versailles:** a sculpture he showed in the palace gardens in 2015 was repeatedly vandalised
- **Politics:** he has been an outspoken critic of nationalism, in Britain and in India
Recognition
He was knighted in 2013 and received the Padma Bhushan in 2012. He was awarded the Genesis Prize in 2017 and gave the prize money to help refugees.
Personal Life
He married the German-born art historian Susanne Spicale in 1995; they had a daughter and a son and later divorced. He has a daughter with his second wife, Sophie Walker. He works from a large studio in south London and has a foundation and a home in Venice. He has said that he does not think of himself as an Indian artist or a British one, but simply as an artist.
Featured image: Anish Kapoor during an interview in December 2017. Photo by Vogler, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
