Famous contemporary artist, Anish Kapoor, pictured in 2017.
Anish Kapoor rose to prominence in the 1980s with his large sculptures and installations that explored biomorphic forms, colour, and reflective surfaces. Since then, he has established his reputation as one of the most influential artists alive today, as well as one of the richest.
Though Kapoor is primarily considered a sculptor, he has experimented with other mediums, including printmaking. Indeed, prints account for 35% of his work sold at auction, and they usually fetch between £1,000 and £5,000, with some attaining far higher prices.
Anish Kapoor may be popular in the art market, but he is not without controversy, and he tends to divide critics. Continue reading to discover five things you might not have known about Anish Kapoor.
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He Was Born In India
Anish Kapoor was born in Mumbai, India, in 1954 to an Iraqi Jewish mother and an Indian Punjabi Hindu father. He attended The Doon School, an elite male boarding school in Dehradun, and in the early 1970s, he moved to Israel for a while before deciding to become an artist. The decision led him to leave for Britain, where he studied art at a variety of institutions and began to make a name for himself.
Since then, Kapoor has lived and worked in England, though his birth-country still influences his artwork. The artist travelled extensively through India in 1979, and the experience gave him a renewed appreciation of the country. Some of his earliest works were inspired by the bright, powdered pigments sold in India, and vibrant colours remain intrinsic in both his sculptures and his prints.
Mumbai Pictured in 1950
He Has Generated Significant Controversy
Anish Kapoor cannot be said to be popular within the artistic community; one reason for this is that in 2016, Kapoor bought the exclusive rights to Vantablack, a coating made by the British technology company Surrey NanoSystems. Said to be the darkest substance ever created by man, hundreds of artists were, understandably, interested in using the colour in their own work, and Kapoor’s monopoly of it did not endear him to them, with English artist Christian Furr saying, “This black is like dynamite in the art world… It isn’t right that it belongs to one man.”
Despite the unpopularity of his actions, Kapoor has undoubtedly profited from his exclusive access to Vantablack. Known for his vibrant colours and pigments (seen in prints like 12 Etchings and Horizon Shadow), Kapoor’s installation pieces made with Vantablack were a step away from his usual explosions of colour, but they have been no less popular.
His Most Expensive Prints Sold For Over £33,000
Shadow III is a series of nine prints from 2009; it’s part of Kapoor’s wider Shadow sequence (which also comprises Shadow I and Shadow II), and it’s extremely popular at auction. Shadow III involves prints of different colour gradually fading into a luminous central white void, thus playing on the viewer’s perception of two- and three-dimensional objects. The series was sold by Artcurial in December 2017 for £33,476.
Shadow III sold by Artcurial in 2017
He Has A Long-Running Feud With Stuart Semple
There’s no doubt Kapoor caused outrage by buying the rights to Vantablack, but nobody has battled against him more fervently than Stuart Semple, a British artist who often makes his own pigments.
One of Semple’s reactions to what he calls Kapoor’s “colour hoarding” was to release the world’s “pinkest pink” pigment and make it widely available online. However, before buying it, you must “confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information, and belief, this paint will not make its way into the hands of Anish Kapoor.”
The feud was furthered when Kapoor posted a picture on Instagram of his middle finger dipped in the pink pigment, with the caption “Up Yours”. The pettiness of the retaliation did nothing to help end the vendetta, and Semple has since gone one step further; in June 2024, he legally changed his name to Anish Kapoor, saying he liked “the idea of being able to try a name on and see how it feels.”
He Plays With Optical Illusions
Many of Kapoor’s prints play with perspective; the Shadow I-III series, for instance, can make the viewer feel they’re being sucked towards the blinding white light at the centre of each print. In the same way, his use of unusual shapes and highly-polished stainless steel in sculptures such as Cloud Gate (known colloquially as ‘the bean’) and Sky Mirror can reflect a distorted reality, forcing people to do a double-take and look again.
Kapoor’s skill with optical illusions, however, has led to the odd accident; in 2018, an Italian man in his 60s fell into Kapoor’s installation piece, Descent into Limbo, at an exhibition of the artist’s work in Portugal. The piece resembled a black circle painted on the floor, and it gave the impression that it was both solid and two-dimensional, whilst actually being a hole in the ground that was eight feet deep and covered in the notorious Vantablack.
Cloud Gate – Anish Kapoor
