Anish Kapoor

Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor (b. 12 March 1954, Mumbai, India) is a globally renowned British-Indian sculptor and installation artist whose work has redefined contemporary sculpture through its commanding engagement with form, space, void, and perception. Born to a Punjabi Hindu father and an Iraqi-Jewish mother in Mumbai, Kapoor moved to the United Kingdom in the early 1970s to study at Hornsey College of Art and the Chelsea School of Art, where he developed a radical visual language that interrogates the relationships between presence and absence, mass and emptiness.

Over a career spanning five decades, Kapoor’s practice has embraced a wide range of materials—from polished stainless steel and mirrors to stone, wax, pigment, PVC, and concrete—always probing the limits of perception and spatial experience. His early works experimented with powdered pigments and geometric forms, while later pieces explored negative space and embodied voids, creating sculptures that seem to recede into themselves or transform their surroundings.

Kapoor’s monumental public works are among the most iconic of contemporary art. These include Cloud Gate (2004), affectionately known as “The Bean” in Chicago’s Millennium Park; Sky Mirror, installed in New York and London; and the ArcelorMittal Orbit (2012) for the London Olympic Park. Other major works such as Marsyas for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and large-scale installations around the world demonstrate his enduring engagement with architecture, scale, and the viewer’s embodied presence in space.

Kapoor’s contributions have been recognized with numerous honors, including the Turner Prize (1991), a CBE (2003), a knighthood for services to visual arts (2013), the Padma Bhushan (2012), and international prizes such as the Premio Duemila at the Venice Biennale (1990). He was also the first living artist to receive a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. His work is held in major institutional collections worldwide, from the Tate Modern and MoMA to the Guggenheim Museums and Getty.

Living and working in London and Venice, Kapoor continues to expand the expressive possibilities of sculpture and installation, merging conceptual rigor with profound sensory and philosophical impact—inviting audiences to encounter the world through shape, space, reflection, and the resonant silence of the void.