Anish Kapoor CBE RA (born 12 March 1954)
is a British sculptor of Indian birth. Born in Mumbai (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 initially began exhibiting as part of New British
Sculpture art scene. He went on to exhibit internationally at venues
such as the Tate Gallery and Hayward Gallery in London, Kunsthalle
Basel, Haus der Kunst Munich, Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Reina
Sofia in Madrid, MAK Vienna, and the ICA Boston. 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. Notable
public sculptures include Cloud Gate, Millennium Park,
Chicago, and Sky Mirror at the Rockefeller Center, New York.
Anish Kapoor is a Royal Academician and was made a
Commander of the British Empire in 2003. He is also a Distinguished
supporter of the British Humanist Association.
Kapoor was raised in an Indian home. His mother was
a Jewish immigrant from Baghdad. “My mother was then only a few
months old. She had an Indian-Jewish upbringing. Her father, my
grandfather, was the cantor in the synagogue in Pune. At the time,
the Jewish community in Mumbai was quite large, mostly consisting of
Baghdadi Jews.” His father, from a Punjabi family, was a
hydrographer in the Indian Navy.
Kapoor spent his early years in India, first in
Mumbai, and then in Dehra Dun at the Doon School. During 1971-1973,
he went to Israel with one of his two brothers. He first stayed in a
kibbutz, and then studied electrical engineering.He then left for
Britain where he attended Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School
of Art and Design.
He achieved widespread recognition when he
represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale.
Kapoor's pieces are frequently simple, curved forms,
usually monochromatic and brightly coloured. His early pieces rely on
powder pigment to
cover the works and the floor around them. Such use of pigment
characterised his first high profile exhibit as part of the New
Sculpture exhibition at the Hayward
Gallery London in 1978. This practice was inspired by the mounds
of brightly coloured pigment in the markets and temples of
India. His later 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). His most recent
works are mirror-like, reflecting or distorting the viewer and
surroundings. The use of red wax is also part of his current
repertoire, evocative of flesh, blood and transfiguration.
Svayambh, commonly known as "the train",
a huge block of red wax pushed slowly through the gallery, here at
the Royal Academy in London.
Kapoor has produced a number of large works,
including Taratantara (1999), a 35 metre-tall piece installed
in the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead, England before renovation
began there and Marsyas (2002), a large work of steel and
flesh-coloured PVC that reached end to end of the 3,400-square-foot
(320 m2) Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. A stone arch by
Kapoor is permanently placed at the shore of a lake in Lødingen in
northern Norway. In 2000, one of Kapoor's works, Parabolic Waters,
consisting of rapidly rotating coloured water, was shown outside the
Millennium Dome in London. In 2001, Sky Mirror, a large mirror piece
that reflects the sky and surroundings, was commissioned for a site
outside the Nottingham Playhouse. Since 2006, Cloud Gate, a 110-ton
stainless steel sculpture with a mirror finish, has been permanently
installed in Millennium Park in Chicago. Viewers are able to walk
beneath the sculpture and look up into an omphalos or navel
above them. In the autumn of 2006, a second Sky Mirror, was installed
in Rockefeller Center, New York. Soon to be completed are a memorial
to the British victims of 9/11 in New York, and the design and
construction of two subway stations in Naples. Kapoor has also been
commissioned to produce five pieces of public art by Tees Valley
Regeneration (TVR) collectively known as the "Tees Valley
Giants"
In 2007, he showed Svayambh (which can be
roughly translated as 'self-generated'), a 1.5 metre carved block of
red wax that moved on rails through the Nantes Musée des Beaux-Arts
as part of the Biennale estuaire; this piece was shown again in a
major show at the Haus Der Kunst in Munich and in 2009 at the Royal
Academy in London. Kapoor's recent work increasingly blurs the
boundaries between architecture and art.
In 2008, the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Boston exhibited Kapoor's first U.S. mid-career
survey. In the same year, Kapoor created the sculpture "Memory"
in Berlin and New York for the Guggenheim Foundation.
Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem,
Israel Museum
In 2009 Anish Kapoor became the first Guest Artistic
Director of Brighton Festival. As well as informing the content of
the festival as a whole, Kapoor installed 4 significant sculptures
for the duration of the festival; Sky Mirror at Brighton Pavilion
gardens, C-Curve at The Chattri, Blood Relations (a collaboration
with author Salman Rushdie) and 1000 Names, both at Fabrica. He also
created 2 new works: a large site-specific work entitled ‘The
Dismemberment of Jeanne d’Arc’ and a performance based
installation entitled ‘Imagined Monochrome’. The public response
was so overwhelming that police had to re-divert traffic around C
Curve at the Chattri and exercise crowd control.
In 2009, Anish Kapoor, Carsten Höller and Giuseppe
Penone were asked to create three "permanent, site-specific
works in harmony with the light and colors" of Pollino National
Park, the largest national park in Italy, as the first edition of
project ArtePollino – Another South. Kapoor's work, Cinema
di Terra (Earth Cinema), in the thermally active spa area of
Latronico, is a 45m long, 3m wide and 7m deep cut into the landscape
made from concrete and earth. People can enter from both sides and
walk along it until they reach a small square from where they can see
the landscape from within. Cinema di Terra officially opened
to public in September 2009.
In 2010 a new Anish Kapoor sculpture called "Turning
the World Upside Down, Jerusalem" was commissioned and
installed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The sculpture is
described as a "16-foot tall polished-steel hourglass" and
it "reflects and reverses the Jerusalem sky and the museum's
landscape, a likely reference to the city's duality of celestial and
earthly, holy and profane."
Kapoor also designed the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a 115
metre spiral sculpture of the Olympic rings. Planned to be built in
time for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, the piece will be the
largest example of public art in the UK when completed.
In November 2010, Kapoor retrospective exhibitions
were held at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi
and Mumbai’s Mehboob Studio, the first showcase of his work in the
country of his birth.
When asked if engagement with people and places is
the key to successful public art, Kapoor said,
“
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I’m thinking
about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will
comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level
and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a
way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn
good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an
idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates
objects.
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”
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His work is collected worldwide, notably by the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London,
Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the De Pont
Foundation in Tilburg, Netherlands, and the 21st Century Museum of
Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.
Kapoor's gallery representations include the Lisson
Gallery, London and the Gladstone Gallery, New York.
Throughout his career, Kapoor has worked extensively
with architects and engineers. Kapoor insists that this body of work
is neither pure sculpture nor pure architecture. Notable
architectural projects include: (i) the recently announced Tees
Valley (England) "Giants", the world's five largest
sculptures in collaboration with Cecil Balmond of the engineering
company Arup's Advanced Geometry Unit, (ii) two subway stations in
Naples in collaboration with Future Systems, (iii) an unrealised
project for the Millennium Dome, London, (1995) in collaboration with
Philip Gumuchdjian, (iv) a proposal for the Princess Diana Memorial
Fountain and (v) "Building for a Void", created for Expo
'92, Seville, in collaboration with David Connor. “Taratantara”
(1999–2000) was installed at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary
Art, Gateshead and later at Piazza Plebiscito, Naples. Kapoor has
also completed the massive Dismemberment Stage 1, installed in
New Zealand on the private "art park" known as "The
Farm" and owned by New Zealand businessman and art patron Alan
Gibbs.
Of his vision for the Cumana station in Monte
Sant'Angelo, Naples, Italy currently under construction (as of June
2008), Kapoor has said:
“
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It’s very
vulva-like. The tradition of the Paris or Moscow metro is of
palaces of light, underground. I wanted to do exactly the opposite
– to acknowledge that we are going underground. So it’s dark,
and what I’ve done is bring the tunnel up and roll it over as a
form like a sock.
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”
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Anish Kapoor was the first living British artist to take
over the Royal Academy, London, from September 26 - December 11,
2009.
