Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor gained worldwide fame for his sculptures that defy the perception of form, colour and space. ‘I have no message,’ the artist said in 1998. ‘My task is to create the means for a poetic way of seeing.’ His works continually operate on the boundary between the visible and the invisible, cajoling the viewer into a meditative state of careful looking.

Kapoor’s breakthrough came with minimalist works in the late 1970s. As part of the New British Sculpture movement, he embraced a postmodern approach that blended high and low art with new techniques and paid greater attention to cultural diversity. In the early 1980s, he solidified his reputation with geometric sculptures covered in intensely-hued pigments. These works straddle the divide between painting and sculpture and explore the tension between what is tangible and intangible.

The artist later shifted his focus to form and emptiness as a metaphor for interiority – an inner space that elicits both fear and desire. That experience of emptiness and endlessness is the central theme of works such as Descent into Limbo (1992). Starting in the mid-1990s, Kapoor’s work became more monumental in scale and he began to experiment with industrial materials such as PVC, fibreglass and steel. In these works, he ingeniously toys with the viewer’s perception and the sense of presence versus absence, varying from the subtly convex wall in When I am Pregnant (1995) to the enormous reflective surface of Sky Mirror (2017).