ANISH KAPOOR

Education

Kapoor studied in London, where he attended Hornsey College of Art (1973–77) and Chelsea College of Arts (1977–78).

Early pigment works

In the 1980s, Kapoor gained recognition with floor- and wall-based sculptures made from wood, cement, and polystyrene, saturated in loose pigment that bleeds into the surrounding space. Works such as As if to celebrate, I discovered a mountain blooming with red flowers (1981), first shown at Whitechapel Gallery’s survey of 20th-century British sculpture, evoke blood and female anatomy through a red three-peaked “mountain”, paired red ellipsoids, and a yellow, boat-like form that suggests movement and birth. The title combines a Haiku fragment with a Hindu myth in which a goddess emerges from a mountain of male gods’ bodies, reflecting Kapoor’s interest in myth, ritual, and embodiment. During this period he was associated with the New British Sculpture generation, alongside artists such Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley and Shirazeh Houshiary—known as the New British Sculptors.

The Void

Through the late 1980s and 1990s, Kapoor’s sculptures expanded in scale as he focused on cavities, apertures, and forms that appear to disappear into walls or floors. Void Field (1989), a grid of sandstone blocks punctured by deep holes filled with black pigment and shown at the 44th Venice Biennale, sets the mass of stone against seemingly bottomless voids to stage a tension between being and non-being, interior space and darkness. He amplified this language in Marsyas (2002), a Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern, where a stretched red PVC membrane suspended between three steel rings fills the entire space like a vast, hollow trumpet, transforming the hall into a bodily, organ-like interior. Kapoor’s fascination with the void also underpins his controversial exclusive rights to the super-black material Vantablack, secured in 2016, which prompted British artist Stuart Semple to develop open-access super-black paints such as Black 3.0, marketed pointedly as available to everyone except Kapoor.

Mirrors, theatricality, and participation

From the mid-1990s, Kapoor increasingly turned to highly polished, often concave stainless-steel forms that treat reflection as a sculptural medium. Works including Her Blood (1998) and Blood Mirror (2000) use red-lacquered, mirrored discs that read as voids from afar but, up close, warp and multiply the viewer’s image, destabilising perception. This performative quality extends to his ‘Non-Object’ series of twisted stainless-steel sculptures and to Ishi’s Light (2003), an ovoid shell with a fibreglass exterior and lacquered red interior that partially opens to admit the viewer, enveloping them in distorted reflections and amplified sound. In an interview from 2016, Kapoor described this as a “performative” dimension in which the work switches itself on as you enter its space. I think it’s terribly important because that’s a conversation between a viewer and an object.’

New materials and public works

Kapoor continues to explore advanced materials, presenting new works using carbon nanotechnology at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, where ultra-black surfaces deepen his longstanding investigation of voids and perceptual limits. In the public realm he is best known for large-scale sculptures that recast urban space through reflection and engineered spectacle, notably Cloud Gate (2004), the seamless, bean-shaped stainless-steel sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park whose curved surface compresses and stretches the city’s skyline. Other major landmarks include ArcelorMittal Orbit (2012), a 115-metre tower of looping red tubular steel in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and Descension (2014), a circular pool of endlessly swirling dark water installed near Brooklyn Bridge, which reads as a liquid vortex opening in the ground

Anish Kapoor Exhibitions

Anish Kapoor has exhibited internationally in major institutions and galleries. Select solo exhibitions by Kapoor include:

• Anish Kapoor: Early Works, Jewish Museum, New York, USA (2025–2026)
• Anish Kapoor: Unseen, ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark (2024)
• INFLAMAÇÃO, Casa Bradesco at Cidade Matarazzo, São Paulo, Brazil (2024)
• Anish Kapoor. Untrue Unreal, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy (2023–2024)
• Anish Kapoor, Untrue Unreal, Palazzo Strozzi (2023)
• Anish Kapoor, Museum of Contemporary Art and Urban Planning, Shenzhen (2021)
• Anish Kapoor, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020)
• Anish Kapoor, Lisson Gallery, London (2019)
• Anish Kapoor, SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo (2016)
• Gathering Clouds, Kukje Gallery, Seoul (2016)
• Anish Kapoor and Rembrandt, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2015)

Anish Kapoor’s Website

Anish Kapoor’s website can be found here.

Anish Kapoor FAQs

Ocula | 2025