Anish Kapoor

Style: Neo Expressionism;

Place: Bombay

Born: 1954

Biography:

Sir Anish Mikhail Kapoor, CBE, RA is a British sculptor. Born in Bombay, Kapoor has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s when he moved to study art, first at the Hornsey College of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art and Design.
He represented Britain in the XLIV Venice Biennale in 1990, when he was awarded the Premio Duemila Prize. In 1991, he received the Turner Prize and in 2002 received the Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Notable public sculptures include Cloud Gate (colloquially 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 2017 Kapoor designed the statuette for the 2018 Brit Awards.
Kapoor received a knighthood in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to visual arts. He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Oxford in 2014. In 2012, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Indian government which is India's third-highest civilian award. 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 February 2017 Kapoor, who is Jewish, was announced as the recipient of the USD$1 million Genesis Prize, which "recognises individuals who have attained excellence and international renown in their fields and whose actions and achievements express a commitment to Jewish values, the Jewish community and the State of Israel".
Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay, India (now Mumbai), to a Jewish mother and a Hindu father. His maternal grandfather served as cantor of the synagogue in Pune. At this 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 Canada-based academic Ilan Kapoor.
Kapoor attended The Doon School, an all-boys boarding school in Dehradun, then in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. He is said to have "hated" his time at Doon. 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. Kapoor went on to teach at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1979 and in 1982 was Artist in Residence at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. He has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s.
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. "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." Such use of pigment characterised his first high-profile exhibit as part of the New Sculpture exhibition at the Hayward Gallery London in 1978.
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."
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 installed in the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead, England, before renovation began there; 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 3,400-square-foot (320 m2) 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.

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