Anish Kapoor

Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor, (born 12 March 1954) is a British-Indian sculptor specializing in installation art and conceptual art.

Born in Mumbai, Kapoor attended the elite all-boys Indian boarding school The Doon School, before moving to the UK to begin his art training at Hornsey College of Art and, later, Chelsea School of Art and Design.

He has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s.

In 1971 he moved to Israel with one of his two brothers, initially living on a kibbutz.

He began to study electrical engineering, but had trouble with mathematics and quit after six months.

In Israel, he decided to become an artist.

In 1973, he left for Britain to attend Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art and Design.

There he found a role model in Paul Neagu, an artist who provided a meaning to what he was doing.

Such use of pigment characterised his first high-profile exhibit as part of the New Sculpture exhibition at the Hayward Gallery London in 1978.

Kapoor went on to teach at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1979 and in 1982 was Artist in Residence at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

Kapoor became known in the 1980s for his geometric or biomorphic sculptures using simple materials such as granite, limestone, marble, pigment and plaster.

These early sculptures are frequently simple, curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly coloured, using powder pigment to define and permeate the form.

He has said of the sculptures "While making the pigment pieces, it occurred to me that they all form themselves out of each other. So I decided to give them a generic title, A Thousand Names, implying infinity, a thousand being a symbolic number. The powder works sat on the floor or projected from the wall. The powder on the floor defines the surface of the floor and the objects appear to be partially submerged, like icebergs. That seems to fit inside the idea of something being partially there..."

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Kapoor was acclaimed for his explorations of matter and non-matter, specifically evoking the void in both free-standing sculptural works and ambitious installations.

Many of his sculptures seem to recede into the distance, disappear into the ground or distort the space around them.

In 1987, he began working in stone.

His later stone works are made of solid, quarried stone, many of which have carved apertures and cavities, often alluding to, and playing with dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightness-darkness, visible-invisible, conscious-unconscious, male-female, and body-mind).

"In the end, I’m talking about myself. And thinking about making nothing, which I see as a void. But then that’s something, even though it really is nothing."

Kapoor has received several distinctions and prizes, such as the Premio Duemila Prize at the XLIV Venice Biennale in 1990, the Turner Prize in 1991, the Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, the Padma Bhushan by the Indian government in 2012, a knighthood in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to visual arts, an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Oxford in 2014.

Since 1995, he has worked with the highly reflective surface of polished stainless steel.

These works are mirror-like, reflecting or distorting the viewer and surroundings.

Over the course of the following decade Kapoor's sculptures ventured into more ambitious manipulations of form and space.

He produced a number of large works, including Taratantara (1999), a 35-metre-high piece which was installed in the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead, England, prior to the renovation beginning there which turned the structure into the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art; and Marsyas (2002), a large work consisting of three steel rings joined by a single span of PVC membrane that reached end to end of the 3400 sqft Turbine Hall of Tate Modern.

Kapoor's Eye in Stone (Norwegian: Øye i stein) is permanently placed at the shore of the fjord in Lødingen in northern Norway as part of Artscape Nordland.

In 2000, one of Kapoor's works, Parabolic Waters, consisting of rapidly rotating coloured water, was shown outside the Millennium Dome in London.

The use of red wax is also part of his repertoire, evocative of flesh, blood, and transfiguration.

His notable public sculptures include Cloud Gate (2006, also known as "The Bean") in Chicago's Millennium Park; Sky Mirror, exhibited at the Rockefeller Center in New York City in 2006 and Kensington Gardens in London in 2010; Temenos, at Middlehaven, Middlesbrough; Leviathan, at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2011; and ArcelorMittal Orbit, commissioned as a permanent artwork for London's Olympic Park and completed in 2012.

In 2007, he showed Svayambh (which translated from Sanskrit means "self-generated"), a 1.5-metre block of red wax that moved on rails through the Nantes Musée des Beaux-Arts as part of the Biennale estuaire; this piece was shown again in a major show at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and in 2009 at the Royal Academy in London.

Some of Kapoor's work blurs the boundaries between architecture and art.

In 2008, Kapoor created Memory in Berlin and New York for the Guggenheim Foundation, his first piece in Cor-Ten, which is formulated to produce a protective coating of rust.

An image of Kapoor features in the British cultural icons section of the newly designed British passport in 2015.

In 2016, he was announced as a recipient of the LennonOno Grant for Peace.

In 2017, Kapoor designed the statuette for the 2018 Brit Awards.

and the 2017 Genesis Prize for "being one of the most influential and innovative artists of his generation and for his many years of advocacy for refugees and displaced people".

Anish Mikhail Kapoor was born in Mumbai, India, to an Iraqi Jewish mother and an Indian Punjabi Hindu father.

His maternal grandfather served as cantor of the synagogue in Pune.

At the time, Baghdadi Jews constituted the majority of the Jewish community in Mumbai.

His father was a hydrographer and applied physicist who served in the Indian Navy.

Kapoor is the brother of Ilan Kapoor, a professor at York University, Toronto, Canada.

Kapoor attended The Doon School, an all-boys boarding school in Dehradun, India.