Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor believes autobiography is a trifling art form: his work most often reflects his spectator’s vision rather than his own. Born in Mumbai, Kapoor established himself as a sculptor in London, but his experiments with perception surpass banal assumptions about either "Indian" or "English" artists. Kapoor has been condemned as pompous and pretentious: his epic Cloud Gate in Chicago is one of the priciest pieces of public art in the world, and his proposed design for a spiraling red tower standing taller than Big Ben to mark London's 2012 Olympics has been roundly criticized as too lavish and expensive for a recessionary time. But despite his critics, Kapoor's site-specific works hold an imposing value. Relying on the concepts that space is fiction, scale is merely a tool and color has both physical reality and an illusory element, Kapoor's sculptures are left to run wild in the viewer's imagination. In this place/non-place, the viewer mentally manipulates Kapoor's forms to discover or deconstruct their essence. Far from pretentious, Kapoor’s structures seduce precisely because they don’t impose a literal meaning but thrust the viewer into a realm outside language and beyond image.