Anish Kapoor

(British/Indian, born 1954)

Anish Kapoor is a leading contemporary British-Indian artist working in large-scale abstract public sculpture. Among his best-known works is the popular Cloud Gate (2006), otherwise known as “the Bean,” featured in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Throughout his career, Kapoor has worked on a variety of scales and with diverse materials—mirrors, stone, wax, and PVC—exploring both biomorphic and geometric forms with a particular interest in negative space. “That's what I am interested in: the void, the moment when it isn't a hole,” he explained. “It is a space full of what isn't there.” Born on March 12, 1954 in Bombay, India, Kapoor moved to London in the late 1970s, studying at both the Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea College of Arts. He first gained critical recognition for his work in the 1980s, with his metaphysical site-specific works in which he manipulates form and the perception of space. Kapoor was awarded the Turner Prize in 1991, and named a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2003, and Knighthood in 2013 for services to the visual arts. In 2016, Mexico City’s Museo Universiatrio Arte Contemporáneo held a major retrospective of his work. The artist currently lives in London, United Kingdom. Kapoor’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Fondazione Prada in Milan, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.