Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor is one of Britain's most acclaimed artists, well known for sculptures of scale, dynamism and splendid simplicity. Most often playing with dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightness-darkness, visible-invisible, conscious-unconscious, male-female), evoking awe through size and simple beauty. Kapoor's work is both innovative in engineering terms as well as artistically, engaging the viewer, and responding directly to the immediate environment. The project results very much from a close collaboration between Anish Kapoor and engineer Cecil Balmond who has gained a reputation for working with architects and artists in a way that rethinks structure not as a support or framework for a given shape but as an integral, creative element of a design.
Born in Bombay in 1954, Kapoor's first solo exhibition was held in Paris in 1980.
His international reputation was quickly established, with a string of solo shows in London and worldwide including venues such as Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, Tate Gallery and Hayward Gallery in London, Reina Sofia in Madrid and CAPC in Bordeaux, France. He represented Britain in 1990 at the Venice Biennale, for which he was awarded the prestigious Premio Duemila. He also won the Turner Prize Award in 1991 and was awarded a CBE in 2003.
Kapoor's work is collected worldwide, notably by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the De Pont Foundation in the Netherlands and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan. Kapoor has also been chosen to design the British Memorial sculpture at Ground Zero in New York.