Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor was born on 12 March 1954 in Mumbai, India, to a father of Indian Hindu heritage and a mother of Iraqi Jewish heritage. He moved to Britain in the 1970s, studying at Hornsey College of Art from 1973 to 1977 and subsequently at Chelsea School of Art and Design from 1977 to 1978. He has lived and worked in London and Venice ever since, developing a practice that has come to occupy a singular position in contemporary sculpture and installation art.

Kapoor's early work centred on saturated pigment applied to shaped forms, a direction crystallised in the series 1000 Names, begun in 1979, in which raw pigment dissolved the physical boundary of the object into something closer to pure colour and immateriality. This investigation of the void as an active sculptural force — rather than an absence — became a defining thread across his career. Void Field, a grouping of sandstone blocks with pigment-filled cavities, was exhibited at the 44th Venice Biennale, where Kapoor represented Britain and received the Premio Duemila in 1990. The following year he was awarded the Turner Prize. Descent into Limbo (1992) pushed this further, presenting what reads as a seemingly bottomless opening in the floor — a perceptual trap in which the eye cannot resolve depth from surface. Later works such as Descension (2014) returned to the same territory, this time generating the void through continuously circulating black water.

At architectural and civic scale, Kapoor has produced some of the most discussed public sculptures of the past three decades. Marsyas (2002), a vast red PVC membrane commissioned for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, transformed the building into something bodily and cavernous. Cloud Gate (2004–2006), permanently installed in Millennium Park, Chicago, folds the city and its visitors into a seamless reflective surface. Sky Mirror (2001) turns sky and surrounding architecture into unstable, shifting images, while Leviathan (2011), created for the Grand Palais in Paris, made one of Europe's grandest interiors feel organic and enclosing. ArcelorMittal Orbit (2012), a permanent steel structure in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London, operates simultaneously as sculpture, observation tower, and civic landmark. Tall Tree and the Eye (2009), held in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, stacks reflective spheres to disrupt the viewer's sense of form and scale. Svayambh (2007) introduced a different register — a self-propelled mass of wax moving through architecture on rails, leaving material traces that combine ritual with something closer to violence.

Kapoor has been appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2003, received the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India in 2012, and was awarded a Knighthood in 2013. His galleries include Lisson Gallery in London and Galleria Continua in San Gimignano as primary representatives, alongside Opera Gallery, Galerie Mennour, SCAI The Bathhouse in Tokyo, and Kukje Gallery in Seoul. Works are held in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, and the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. The Anish Kapoor Foundation, established in London in 2017, is based at Palazzo Manfrin in Venice. Looking ahead, 2026 brings a major retrospective spanning five decades at the Hayward Gallery in London, a new presentation at Palazzo Manfrin coinciding with the 61st Venice Biennale, and a concurrent exhibition at the Serlachius Museum in Finland — alongside a revisitation of his formative pigment works at The Jewish Museum in New York, on view from 2025 into 2026.