Marsyas, 2002 Anish Kapoor is one of Great Britain’s leading sculptors. Born in Bombay in 1954 to a Punjabi-Hindu father and a Baghdadi-Jewish mother, he attended the prestigious Doon School in Dehra Dun, India. He later moved to England in 1972, where he studied art at the Hornsey College of Art and the Chelsea School of Design. He gained international recognition in the early 1980s as one of a group of British sculptors who were working in a new, minimal style. Kapoor’s work, though restrained in its form, is always sensual, often employing richly pigmented colors.
Cloud Gate, 2004 He is concerned with “a certain kind of disorientation that I hope reorients,” he has said: “trying to hold things to a certain stillness… so that somehow one is forced to slow down enough, to look, to measure with perhaps a little uncertainty in the eye, so that you have to put your hand out to affirm that what you are looking at is really there.” As a sculptor, Kapoor often works on a very large scale, producing works like Taratantara (1999), a 115-foot installation in the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead, England, and Marsyas (2002), an installation made of steel rings and red PVC membrane at the Tate Modern in London. Marsyas is so enormous, the whole thing cannot be seen from any one position. “I want to make body into sky,” Kapoor remarked about this piece. In his work on paper, despite the medium’s restrictions of smaller size and two dimensions, Kapoor’s work remains symbolic and sublime.
Between 1988 and 1991, Anish Kapoor completed 23 etchings and two woodcuts at Crown Point Press. Each of them is beautiful in its own way, as each seems to have its own particular combination of motion and stillness. Some seem to have currents, pulling all their delicate, spidery lines in the same direction; others are like voids that expel bristling energy. Perhaps it is because he thinks like a sculptor that Kapoor can make these flat shapes seem so palpable: there is a magnetism there that one can almost feel.
Taratantara, 1999 Anish Kapoor is represented by the Lisson Gallery in London and the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York. His work has been seen in major one-person and group exhibitions around the world. He lives and works in London, and visits India frequently. His public commissions include the “Cast Iron Mountain” at the Tachikawa Art Project in Japan, as well as two untitled works in Toronto and at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Kapoor has shown in solo shows in London at the Tate Modern and the Hayward Gallery, the Musee des Arts Contemporains in Belgium and the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux, and his work is in the collections of museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. Kapoor represented Britain in the 1990 Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Premio Duemila. He won the prestigious Turner Prize in Britain the following year, and in an informal competition through the Tate Museum to commemorate the Turner Prize’s 20th anniversary, he was voted the best British artist of the last 20 years.