Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor – Art studies in England, antisemitic hostility

Anish Kapoor was born in Mumbai in India on 12 March 1954. The son of an Indian Hindu and a Jewish Iraqi, he attended a boarding school for boys in Dehradun as a child, a time which Kapoor in retrospect said he hated. At the age of 16 he left his homeland of India for Israel where he lived for a while in a kibbutz, a rural collective settlement. In 1978, his path led him to London where he attended the Hornsey College of Art and then Chelsea College of Art and Design. It is clear in Anish Kapoor’s art that his roots lie in two different cultural areas, even though he employs religious themes only vaguely and cannot be assigned to any religious denomination. Despite this, he still had to fight against hostility towards his part Jewish ancestry, as seen in the installation of his monumental work Dirty Corner which was smeared several times with antisemitic slogans in the park of the Palace of Versailles. The artist eventually decided not to eradicate the damage but declared it an admonitory component of his work.

Sculptor, stage designer and object artist

Anish Kapoor attracted international attention in the 1970s when he first presented his sculptures of colour pigments, inspired, he said, by the mounds of pigments and seasonings at the markets of his Indian home. Over the years, his sculptures increased in size to monumental dimensions and Kapoor’s original natural materials of plaster, chalk and marble were soon replaced with steel, glass and plastic, whilst he particularly valued red wax, reminiscent of flesh and blood. In the 1990s, he was fascinated with the idea of emptiness which he incorporated in the form of sculptures that seemingly disappeared into the distance or underground. Anish Kapoor often undertook exciting collaborations with other artists such as the writer Salman Rushdie for the project Blood Relations or with the opera director Pierre Audi for whom he designed the stage set for his new interpretation of Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal at the Dutch Opera, and designed the 115-meter-high sculpture ArcelorMittal Orbit for the 2012 Olympic Games in the style of an oriental water pipe.

The world’s deepest black

In 2015, Anish Kapoor paid a high sum for the exclusive usage rights of Vantablack, a synthetically produced substance classified as the blackest black in the world, provoking prolonged controversy. Other artists also interested in Vantablack, such as Stuart Semple or Christian Furr, expressed sharp criticism of this exclusivity which applied however only to the field of art and explicitly excluded scientific or other use. The sole use of Vantablack lay close to Anish Kapoor’s heart as the application of the super-black substance appeared to dissolve all surface structures and gave the impression of complete emptiness – a theme which had run through the artist’s work from early on.