Who is Anish Kapoor? | Serlachius | Serlachius+

Pauli Sivonen, Director, SerlachiusEmptiness, infinity, immateriality, purity. We are accustomed to reading such words in texts that attempt to unpack Anish Kapoor’s art for visual-art lovers. But who is Anish Kapoor – an artist whose mysterious works have been inspiring and baffling art audiences and critics for almost five decades?

In summer 2026, Serlachius will be opening a major exhibition by Anish Kapoor, curated by Timo Valjakka.

Kapoor is arguably one of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists. His works are regularly shown in major art museums and are in the collections of, for instance, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern, and the Guggenheim.

Born in Mumbai (then known as Bombay) in 1954, the artist began to build his international career in the 1970’s. At the age of 18, he moved to London to study art, first at Hornsey College of Art, then at the Chelsea School of Art and Design.

The Pull of Emptiness

In Anish Kapoor’s early works, the pigments played a central role. The sculptures were often either singular objects, or in pairs, geometric or organic in shape. In gallery spaces, they seemingly emerged from the floor or the wall made entirely of pigment.

Kapoor also developed an interest in stone. For example, he worked with free-standing sculptures based on simple geometric forms in marble, granite or limestone, which often contained voids – already then, emptiness attracted him. Via these sculptures, he gradually transitioned to larger scaled works that increasingly became part of the architecture.

The artist rose to world fame in the early 1990s. In 1990, he was one of the most watched artists of the younger generation at the 44th Venice Biennale. The following year, he won the Turner Prize, considered Britain’s most important art award. After that, his art began to be shown in the world’s most important art museums and biennials.

Anish Kapoor constantly added to the materials he used in his art, while at the same time remaining faithful to his goals. He was preoccupied with metaphysical opposites: birth and destruction, beauty and horror. His works increased in sensuality; he wanted to challenge both his own and his viewers’ conceptions of beauty.

Kapoor began exploring mirrored surfaces and experimenting with ways of dissolving spatiality into nothingness. The various types of reflection, on the one hand, and the contrasts between immateriality and materiality, on the other, were a way of contemplating the nature of space and reality.

As the works became more architectural in scale the viewer was able to enter them. They were frequently rewarded with illusions, bafflement, and wonder.

Those who move through Anish Kapoor’s works often begin to wonder: “Where am I?” But it is when emotions, possibly even insights, arise out of that confusion that they get their inevitable reward.

Kapoor continued to explore a diversity of materials in his work. For example, in the early 2000’s he began to work with red wax, in works that evoked blood and flesh. He created a mechanical, kinetic aesthetic in works that he has described as ‘auto-generated’, for instance, in his famous cannon work Shooting into the Corner (2009), which shoots wax projectiles into the corner of the gallery walls.

The works’ formal language began to break down and to evolve in a more expressive direction. At the same time, as their scale grew, the artworks and installations became breathtaking experiences in a way that differed from the meditative sculptures of his early career.

His reputation also grew. In 2009, he became the first living visual artist to have a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The exhibition, which attracted almost 300,000 visitors, long held the record for the number of visitors to a contemporary art exhibition in London.

Kapoor, meanwhile, further expanded the scope of his expression. For example, he made monumental public sculptures that have become city landmarks.

The most famous of these include the 110-tonne mirrored sculpture Cloud Gate, nicknamed “The Bean”, which has been amazing both residents and tourists in Chicago’s Millennium Park since 2004, and the world’s first inflatable concert hall Ark Nova (2013), created to tour regions devasted by the 2011 tsunami in Japan.

In 2025 a metro station opened in Naples that Kapoor had worked on since 2003. It includes two monumental entrances to the station that marked a unique symbiosis of sculpture and functional architecture.

Archetypal dualities

Size doesn’t matter, experience does. Anish Kapoor’s art often involves the exhibition visitor seeing or experiencing something almost “perfect” – something that transports them from the everyday to somewhere spiritual or even “sacred”, without religiosity as such being the point of the experience.

When we look at them, we are engaging in dualities: freely contemplating matter and spirit, the visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious, body and mind, earth and sky.

Kapoor’s art resonates with us on very deep psychological and spiritual levels. The experiences he offers clearly speak about something, but without proclaiming. Rather, they leave us – those who experience his works – room for interpretation.

arrow_back arrow_forward