Anish Kapoor (Indian, b.1954) is regarded as one of the most prominent British sculptors of his generation. He first gained critical recognition for his work in the 1980s; Kapoor is well known for his intense, almost spiritual, outdoor and indoor site-specific works in which he marries a Modernist sense of pure materiality with a fascination for the manipulation of form and the perception of space. Kapoor, who was born in Bombay and moved to London in the 1970s to study art, first worked on abstract and organic sculptures using fundamental natural materials such as
granite,
limestone, marble,
pigment and plaster. His sculptures extend formal minimalistic precepts through catching the viewer’s attention with
rich colors, sensuously refined surfaces, and optical effects of depth and dimension.
Since the mid-1990s, Kapoor has explored the notion of the void by creating works that seem to recede into the distance, disappear into walls or floors, or otherwise destabilize assumptions about the physical world. Through transforming properties of objects and materials, Kapoor’s recent work increasingly blurs the boundaries between architecture, design and art. He received great critical attention in the United States for
Cloud Gate, a permanent 110-ton sculpture of polished stainless steel created for Chicago’s Millennium Park in 2006, and for
Sky Mirror, a 35-foot-diameter concave mirror shown in the same year at Rockefeller Center in New York. Kapoor has reached international status, with solo exhibitions at venues around the world, such as the Tate or Hayward Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Basel, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, or the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990, and received the Turner Prize in the following year. Kapoor’s work can be found in collections worldwide, notably in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Prada Art Foundation in Milan, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. He is represented by various galleries including
Leslie Sacks Contemporary in Santa Monica, CA and
Grosvenor Gallery in London.