Anish Kapoor: Biography
Anish Kapoor is a British-Indian artist known for his monumental sculptures and public installations. Born in Bombay, India, in 1954, he studied art at Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art and Design in London.
Anish Kapoor is known for his large-scale sculptures that challenge the perception of space and form, often featuring highly polished and reflective surfaces. Some of his best known works include the "Cloud Gate" sculpture in Chicago, also known as "The Bean", and the "ArcelorMittal Orbit" in London, built for the 2012 Summer Olympics.
Throughout his career, Kapoor has worked at a variety of scales and with diverse materials – mirrors, stone, wax and PVC – exploring biomorphic and geometric forms with a particular interest in negative space. “That's what interests me: the void, the moment when it's not a hole,” he explained. "It's a space full of what doesn't exist." He first gained critical recognition for his work in the 1980s, with his site-specific metaphysical works in which he manipulated form and the perception of space.
Kapoor was awarded the Turner Prize in 1991 and was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellence Order of the British Empire in 2003 and a Knight in 2013 for services to the visual arts. In 2016, the Museo Universiatrio Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City held a major retrospective of his work. The artist currently lives in London, UK.
His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Kapoor's works are part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Fondazione Prada in Milan and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.
Why is Anish Kapoor so popular?
Convex and concave surfaces and mirrors, which offer optical illusions, are a common motif throughout his work. Kapoor's fame skyrocketed in the 1990s, when he represented Great Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale, where he received the Duemila Prize for best young artist. Today, Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation, best known for public sculptures that are extraordinary in the way they are engineered.
What are the characteristics of Anish Kapoor's works?
Anish Kapoor maneuvers between massive scales and different series of work. Huge, stretched or deflated PVC skins; concave or convex mirrors whose reflections attract and engulf the spectator; recesses carved in stone and pigmented to disappear: these voids and bulges summon deeply felt metaphysical polarities of presence and absence, concealment and revelation. The shapes are turned inside out, like wombs, and the materials are not painted, but impregnated with color, as if to deny the idea of an external surface, inviting the viewer into the depths of imagination. Kapoor's geometric shapes from the early 1980s, for example, emerge from the ground and appear to be made of pure pigment, while the viscous blood-red wax sculptures of the last ten years - kinetic and self-generating - devastate their own surfaces and explode. the stillness of the gallery environment. There are resonances with the mythologies of the ancient world - Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman - and with modernity.
5 famous works by Anish Kapoor
British-Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor has made some of the most breathtakingly inspiring and ambitious sculptures. Their forms vary from giant sculptures made of red wax to giant amorphous mirrors that reflect the spectators around them. Often abstract in nature, Kapoor's forms test and push the scope and boundaries of what sculpture can be. They also express contemplative and introspective states of mind. In this article we celebrate the legacy of this great sculptor with a list of his five most popular sculptures.
1. Dismemberment, Site 1, 2009
Anish Kapoor made his impressive and vast public art sculpture Dismemberment, Site 1, 2009, for a large tract of land at Gibbs Farm, Kaipara Harbour, New Zealand. Surprisingly, it is as big as an eight-story building. Kapoor made this sculpture using Serge Ferrari fabric, a monumentally strong fabric that can withstand the harshest of weather conditions. Here it extends like a great trumpet, with a bell shape at each end. The artist designed this unusual shape to amplify the sounds of the landscape as viewers visit this space. But the sculpture also has a dramatic, theatrical impact that contrasts with the green space around it.
2. Cloud Gate, 2004-2006
Known as “The Bean” for its curious elliptical shape, Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate, 2004-6, sits at the AT&T Plaza in Chicago's Millennium Park. Kapoor made this monolithic sculpture from 110 tons of highly polished stainless steel, which he fashioned into a mirrored infinite loop that curves around itself. Cloud Gate is 66 feet long and 33 feet high, making it one of the largest public works of art in existence. In keeping with the spirit of public art, Kapoor encourages visitors to interact with the work and see themselves and the world around them reflected in a variety of twisted new ways.
3. Sky Mirror, 2001
Depending on where it's shown, Anish Kapoor's gigantic, glittering 2001 Sky Mirror sculpture takes on different qualities. Designed in a convex shape, this huge five meter mirror reflects the sky above and turns it upside down. Lord Cholmondeley, owner of Houghton Hall, where Kapoor has exhibited this work, claims that this sculpture "literally brings the heavens down to earth". This sculpture's most interesting trick, however, is its incredible fluidity – in different contexts or weather conditions, viewing Kapoor's Sky Mirror can create viewing experiences that are as changeable and changeable as the patterns of nature or nature. city.
4. Descension, 2014
Swirls, vortices and concave shapes are a recurring theme in Kapoor's practice, and the slightly spooky Descension is no exception. Originally made for a temporary exhibition for India's Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014, Kapoor later reconfigured that same concept for a solo exhibition at Versailles in 2016. The sculpture is a giant whirlpool that swirls in a deep central vortex. Kapoor even dyed his pool water to make it black, a trick that made the dark depths of his pool appear even darker than before. This fascination with black later led Kapoor to his Vantablack controversy.
5. Svayambhu, 2007-2009
Red wax and pigment is another recurring theme in Kapoor's practice. The artist made a series of sculptures and varied installations that play with the curious mutability of pigments, either in powder form or transformed into their own sticky substance, which is made from a combination of wax, vaseline and pigment. Svayambhu must certainly be one of Kapoor's most impressive sculptures in the 'red' theme. Kapoor has created several versions of this installation, notably for the Haus der Kunst (House of Art) in Munich in 2007, and the Royal Academy in London in 2009. The artwork is essentially a red wax path that runs along a path into the gallery space, filling it with a sticky red substance.
Anish Kapoor bought the exclusive rights to Vantablack in 2014
Vantablack was first developed by British manufacturing company Surrey NanoSystems in 2014, for military and astronautical companies, and its reputation quickly gained traction. One of the first to realize the possibilities of this material was Anish Kapoor, who bought the exclusive rights to the pigment so that he could adapt it to a new body of work exploring voids and empty spaces. Kapoor's exclusivity caused a backlash among the artistic community, including Christian Furr and Stuart Semple. Furr told a newspaper: “I never heard of an artist monopolizing a material… This black is like dynamite in the art world. We should be able to use it. It is not right that it belongs to a man.”
Anish Kapoor spent several years fine-tuning Vantablack with NanoSystems so he could incorporate the substance into his large-scale artworks. In 2017, Kapoor teamed up with watchmaker MCT to create a relógio with inner box coated in Vantablack. In 2020, Kapoor planned to reveal a series of sculptures in Vantablack at the Venice Biennale, but with the pandemic, the event ended up being cancelled. A major theme for Kapoor's showcase is the concept of 'non-object', where objects and abstract shapes seem to completely disappear into the space around them.
