Anish Kapoor
Art as mythology
"What we do as artists is mythological: without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story."
Anish Kapoor is one of those rare, history-making artists who has become a household name. He's been making art for over forty years, and it's safe to say he's one of the most well-known living artists in the world. Kapoor’s sculptures create ’active spaces’ in which the viewer’s participation becomes a part of the artwork. Many of his public sculptures worldwide have become iconic landmarks that push the boundaries between art and architecture.
Over the past decade, Kapoor has increasingly focused on painting. While he has often talked about his desire to create objects where the hand is not p...
Anish Kapoor is one of those rare, history-making artists who has become a household name. He's been making art for over forty years, and it's safe to say he's one of the most well-known living artists in the world. Kapoor’s sculptures create ’active spaces’ in which the viewer’s participation becomes a part of the artwork. Many of his public sculptures worldwide have become iconic landmarks that push the boundaries between art and architecture.
Over the past decade, Kapoor has increasingly focused on painting. While he has often talked about his desire to create objects where the hand is not present, his paintings are overtly gestural. This duality and its dissolution is emblematic of his practice as a whole, where the relationships between light and dark, mind and body, truth and untruth, are presented as porous and soluble.
Anish Kapoor (he/him) was born in 1954 in Mumbai, India. Today, he lives and works in London and Venice.
Kapoor has countless accolades to his name. He’s won the Turner Prize and the Genesis Prize, taken over the Tate’s Turbine Hall, installed monumental public artworks in cities around the world and has even received a Knighthood.
The void has been a conceptual language within Kapoor’s work since his pigment sculptures from the late 80s. Most recently he has been working with Vantablack, a material developed using nanotechnology that is capable of absorbing 99.8% of visible light, to take what he terms the ‘non-object’ into radical new territory.
