Anish Kapoor

Anish Mikhail Kapoor, born in Mumbai in 1954, is one of the most influential and widely recognized sculptors of contemporary art. His work moves between sculpture, installation, architecture, and public art, combining monumental scale with intimate physical experience. Through pigment, stone, wax, steel, mirrors, fabric, and voids, Kapoor does more than place objects in space: he changes how people experience their bodies, their surroundings, and the limits of material form.

Kapoor is a Jewish-British artist born in India. His mother was a Baghdadi Jewish woman, and his maternal grandfather served as a cantor in a synagogue in Pune; his father was a Hindu from Punjab who served in the Indian Navy. This family background, together with his years in Israel and Britain, gave his work a broad context of identity, migration, memory, spirituality, and cultural encounter.

From India to Israel and London

Kapoor attended The Doon School, an all-boys boarding school in Uttar Pradesh. In 1971 he moved to Israel with one of his brothers and initially lived at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel. He began studying electrical engineering but left after about six months when he realized that the course did not suit him. In Israel he decided to become an artist. In 1973 he moved to Britain, after not being accepted to Bezalel, and studied at Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art and Design in London.

From 1979 to 1981 he taught art in Wolverhampton, and in 1982 he became Artist in Residence at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Teaching and institutional work connected Kapoor’s individual practice with a wider cultural responsibility. He developed not only as a maker, but also as an artist whose work could function within museums, cities, and communities.

Making material into experience

Kapoor became known in the 1980s for geometric and biomorphic sculptures made from materials such as granite, limestone, marble, pigment, and plaster. In his early works, powdered pigment was spread across the floor or over the surface of a form, making the sculpture appear partly submerged in the ground or as though it had emerged from it. His use of pigment received important early exposure in the New Sculpture exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1978.

He went on to explore the relationship between matter and non-matter, the visible and the invisible, and the body and the void. His stone sculptures, which he began making in 1987, often contain carved openings and cavities that evoke dualities such as earth and sky, matter and spirit, light and darkness, and body and mind. In Kapoor’s work, emptiness is not simply an absence; it becomes a subject, a material, and an experience.

Beginning in 1995, he also worked with highly polished stainless steel. His mirror-like surfaces reflect viewers and their surroundings while also distorting them. The viewer is therefore not an external observer but part of the work, changing with every shift in position.

From sculpture to public monument

Kapoor expanded sculpture into architectural dimensions. Taratantara, created in 1999 and installed in Gateshead, reached approximately 35 metres in height. Marsyas, commissioned for the Unilever Series in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2002, stretched through the vast space using three steel rings and a red PVC membrane. The work transformed the museum hall into an almost bodily environment, experienced from within rather than simply viewed.

In 2007 he presented Svayambh—a 1.5-metre block of red wax that moved slowly on rails through exhibition spaces. Wax, suggesting flesh, blood, and transformation, brought to the surface Kapoor’s continuing interest in processes of formation, dissolution, and change.

Among his best-known public works is Cloud Gate, often called “The Bean,” installed in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Made from approximately 110 tons of stainless steel, the sculpture allows visitors to walk beneath it and see themselves and the skyline within its curved, distorted surface. An abstract sculpture became a shared civic meeting place, a photographic landmark, and an experience for millions of visitors.

Other mirror works, including Sky Mirror, have been shown in Nottingham, at Rockefeller Center in New York, and in Kensington Gardens in London. Earth Cinema, created in Italy’s Pollino National Park, is a long cut through earth and concrete that visitors can enter from either side. Instead of observing a landscape from outside, they walk through a space opened within it.

In 2010 the Israel Museum commissioned Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem. The polished-steel sculpture reflects and reverses the Jerusalem sky and the museum landscape, linking the physical site with an image of a city understood simultaneously as earthly and celestial, ordinary and sacred.

For the London Olympic Games, Kapoor created ArcelorMittal Orbit with engineer Cecil Balmond. Rising approximately 115 metres, the tower combines sculpture, observation platform, and public structure. Visitors can climb through the artwork and experience the Olympic Park and London from within it.

Art, architecture, and cultural institutions

Throughout his career Kapoor has worked with architects and engineers, seeing some projects as neither pure sculpture nor pure architecture. His projects include Temenos in Middlesbrough, created with Balmond; the mobile concert hall Ark Nova, designed with Arata Isozaki for regions of Japan affected by earthquakes; and subway stations in Naples. He has also designed for opera and theatre, including productions of Idomeneo and Pelléas et Mélisande, as well as a dance-theatre work with Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche.

In 2009 Kapoor became the first Guest Artistic Director of the Brighton Festival. That year he was also the first living artist to have a solo exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. The exhibition combined early and new works, including Shooting into the Corner, demonstrating his ability to make monumental art into a sensory, surprising, and sometimes unsettling encounter.

Kapoor represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale and won the Premio Duemila. He received the Turner Prize in 1991 and was elected a Royal Academician in 1999. His further distinctions include the Praemium Imperiale, the CBE and Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, India’s Padma Bhushan, a British knighthood, an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford, and the 2017 Genesis Prize.

Jewish identity and wider contribution

Kapoor’s Jewishness does not appear in his work as a single slogan or exclusive subject, but it is part of the biography from which the work emerged: his Jewish family in Mumbai, the memory of his grandfather’s synagogue, his years in Israel, and his encounter with different religious and cultural worlds. His sustained interest in the void, memory, the body, and forms of presence that cannot be simply grasped can be connected to broad spiritual and human questions without reducing the work to one interpretation.

His connection with Israel received a direct public expression through the Israel Museum commission. The presentation of a major international work in Jerusalem connected Israeli audiences with the global conversation in contemporary art, while placing Jerusalem within the personal language of one of the leading sculptors of his generation.

Kapoor’s influence is also visible in the way public art reaches people who do not regularly visit museums. Cloud Gate, Sky Mirror, and Orbit turned urban sites into places where children, tourists, residents, and artists encounter form, light, scale, and reflection together. This is a significant cultural achievement: sculpture leaves the collection or gallery and enters daily life, changing how people remember a place.

Why this legacy belongs in Moreshet

Anish Kapoor merits inclusion in Moreshet because his work connects a Jewish-Indian family history with a profound influence on global culture. He brought questions of matter and spirit, identity and memory, and the relationship between people and space to the centre of contemporary art. He created sculptures that became symbols of cities around the world, and he presented in Israel a work that views Jerusalem through an international artistic language.

His legacy is not limited to awards or extraordinary scale. It lies in the fact that people far beyond the art world encounter his work in public space and are invited to pause, look again, and discover themselves within it. For Moreshet.com, Kapoor matters because he shows how Jewish roots, Israeli experience, and artistic imagination can become a body of work that shapes cultural life, institutions, and communities across the world.