A 110-tonne polished steel bean reflecting the Chicago skyline in Millennium Park (2006)
Millennium Park, Chicago
Cloud Gate, universally known as The Bean
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Art · 21st century
Anish Kapoor
born 1954 · British-Indian
Contemporary sculpture — void, mirror and monumental form
Anish Kapoor makes sculpture out of holes, mirrors and saturated colour: pigment-covered forms that seem to have no surface, polished steel that swallows the skyline, and voids so dark the eye cannot find the bottom. Born in Mumbai and based in London, he won the Turner Prize in 1991 and has built some of the largest public sculptures in the world.
How to spot them
- ▸Mirror-polished stainless steel curved so that the viewer and the city appear upside down inside it
- ▸Dry powder pigment — deep red, yellow, ultramarine — heaped over or around a form so it seems immaterial
- ▸Voids: a recess or hole painted so black that it reads as a flat disc rather than a hollow
- ▸Vast red or waxy visceral works that fill a whole hall, sometimes extruded slowly by a machine
Key works
A giant concave mirror of polished steel that turns the world upside down, first raised outside a Nottingham theatre (2001)
Nottingham Playhouse (versions in New York and elsewhere)
Later versions have stood at the Rockefeller Center and at Kensington Gardens
Image: Chainwit. · CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
A 114-metre red steel spiral built for the 2012 Olympic Park, later fitted with the world's longest tunnel slide (2012)
Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London
Designed with the engineer Cecil Balmond; Carsten Höller added the slide in 2016
Image: you_only_live_twice from Lighthorne Heath, England · CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
A blood-red PVC membrane stretched between three steel rings the length of a former power station's turbine hall (2002)
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London
Marsyas, named for the satyr flayed alive by Apollo
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Two steel-and-fabric funnels stretched 110 metres between a dock and a viaduct in Middlesbrough (2010)
Middlehaven, Middlesbrough
Temenos, the first of the unrealised Tees Valley Giants series
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
A sixty-metre corten steel funnel dragged across the gardens of a royal palace, vandalised twice in 2015 (2015)
Palace of Versailles, France
Dirty Corner, the work the artist unwisely described in terms of a queen's private parts
No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Mumbai in 1954 to a Punjabi Hindu father, a hydrographer in the Indian Navy, and an Iraqi-Jewish mother; educated at The Doon School
- •Came to Britain in the early 1970s and studied at Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art
- •Made his name with 1000 Names, forms covered in loose powdered pigment, in the early 1980s
- •Represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale, winning the Premio Duemila, and won the Turner Prize in 1991
- •Appointed CBE in 2003 and knighted in 2013
- •Bought exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack, the near-perfect black coating, in 2016, prompting Stuart Semple to create the 'Pinkest Pink' and bar Kapoor from using it
- •His Descent into Limbo, a void of black pigment in a concrete cube, has repeatedly caught out visitors — one fell in at Porto in 2018
- •Opened a foundation in the Palazzo Manfrin in Venice, and in 2026 filled London's Hayward Gallery with a solo show
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- Artnet News — Anish Kapoor's Controversial Vantablack Works
- The Art Newspaper — Anish Kapoor sizes up his biggest-ever sculpture