Anish Kapoor – Ritual and The Void

Who is Anish Kapoor?

Boundary-breaking sculptors are those, who in his or her own way pushed the medium of sculpture forwards into new, unique territories. Anish Kapoor is a leading contemporary artist best known for his large-scale public abstract sculptural works like Cloud Gate (2006), a monumental public installation known locally as “The Bean”, in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Working in a variety of materials including mirrors, stone, wax and PVC, Kapoor is interested in exploring biomorphic and geometric forms, with a particular focus on negative space, the void. Kapoor frequently plays with holes, reflection, perspective and gravity-challenging structures.

Biography of Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor – Objects About Doing and Ritual

Born in 1954 in Mumbai, India, the son of an Iraqi-Jewish mother and a father who was a hydrographer in the navy, Kapoor moved to Israel when he was 17, mostly because the plane ticket was to paid for him. Whilst living there in a Kibbutz, the notion of being an artist first occurred to him, an ambition he felt strongly he could do something actively about. He moved to London to pursue this dream, where he studied at Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art. During his time at art school, he created a lot of performance-based pieces that were deeply symbolic and most usually involved interaction between two people. The pieces were non-narrative, but process-based. An epiphany came in 1979, two years after Kapoor graduated from art school. While visiting his native India, Kapoor was hit by the realisation that the art he had been making had a relationship to what he saw in India. It had to do with a certain attitude towards the object. Kapoor was making objects that were about doing, about ritual. And this aspect of doing, of ritual, he saw everywhere around him in India. As though he had received a kind of affirmation, Kapoor continued to follow his impulses regarding the representation of ritual in his art and from this his first significant works emerged, known as his pigment pieces, consisting of bright shapes on the ground covered in pure pigment.

Scale as a Tool of Sculpture

One of Kapoor’s most famous sculptures is Marsyas, the 10-story-high, 150-metres-long trumpet-shaped structure that occupied Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2002. In Kapoor’s words, “Every idea has its scale. Marsyas wouldn’t be what it is if it were a third of the scale. The pyramids are the size they are because they are. Scale is a tool, a tool of sculpture.” When creating Marsyas, the most important idea for Kapoor was that the viewer could never have a complete view of the sculpture. As such, it would remain mysterious, somehow incomprehensible and unfathomable, and therefore, crucially unobtainable. Visitors experienced the sculpture in a series of different encounters, each time taking in a part of the whole. Another famous Kapoor sculpture is Cloud Gate (2006) in Chicago, nicknamed “The Bean” due to its kidney bean form. This shiny stainless steel sculpture, reflecting and distorting its surroundings whilst also vast enough to allow people to walk underneath its arch, measures 10 by 20 by 13 metres. Kapoor notes the importance of perception and context in its shifting scale: close to the object, it seems very large, while moving away enables a perspective to include the Chicago skyscrapers which tower high above it.