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📂 **Category**: Culture,Anish Kapoor,Art and design,Art,Sculpture,Painting
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IAt Anish Kapoor’s 3,100-square-metre studio complex in south London, photographers, assistants and gallery representatives gather in an upstairs conference room. The artist has a staff of 23 people in London – 11 studio assistants, nine people in offices, and three construction workers at a yard in Battersea – some of whom have been with him for decades. And when he’s in town, everyone wants a piece of art (“It’s like the West Wing,” says one gallery rep).
The studio, which takes up most of the space of a converted dairy, is an upstairs and downstairs residential area. Each room is dedicated to a different type of thing: Big red installations; small black sculptures; Exhibition planning models; Polished concave mirror panels; Archive drawings. In the upstairs conference room, there is a weekly calendar hand-drawn on eight sheets of A3 paper, and beneath it is a very long list titled “Hayward’s Unfinished Business.” And on the windowsill is a strange object: a solid cylinder of concrete, excavated from the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery.
That record was brought by Kapoor’s old friend, outgoing Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rogoff, to celebrate Kapoor’s 72nd birthday in March, as well as their existing collaboration. It is a symbol of a 1.5 meter wide section of the gallery floor that Kapoor has just excavated Preparing for his career-spanning show, which opens in Hayward this week. (Rogoff describes the cylinder as the perfect gift for an artist who has spent his life producing blanks: “This is what happens when you do that.”)
Kapoor emerges from his office wearing a faded black jacket and tattered sneakers, and embarks on a brisk walk and talk, his shoulders slightly hunched, like a runner’s pace. “Honestly,” he says, “it’s all a mess here. But that doesn’t matter. Come on.”
The Southbank Center was the first to give Kapoor a major show in the UK, in 1998. He is one of the few artists to be asked to return for a solo show. “I’m excited and a little scared,” he says. Interestingly, the pieces that worry him most, he says, are the ones that the public knows best.
Kapoor makes his way between inflated figures wrapped in protective blankets, and moves towards a giant red mountain-like structure, just below the top of which he has carved out one of its distinctive voids – a dark rectangular opening. The structure explains, It is one of 31 parts that comprise a new piece titled Ha Makum, dedicated to Hayward. “It’s a huge job, a huge job,” he says, gesturing around the room. “There’s one part of it, and there’s another.”
Next door is another larger plot. The progenitor is “a kind of meteorite figure,” says Kapoor. “We spent, God knows, four, five, or six months on it. It should have been finished a month ago.” A group of helpers in hazmat suits pick away at its pockmarked, pockmarked surface, using what look like ice popsicle batons to apply a red-hued mixture of sawdust and resin.
Kapoor has a track record of, as Rogoff puts it, “of trying to do these very difficult things…He himself can sometimes seem a bit impossible. But it’s all in the service of producing things that are going to be very exciting experiences for people.”
He rose to fame in the 1980s with a series of small geometric sculptures covered in pure pigment, and Kapoor’s international profile was established when he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990. There, he presented a field of large sandstone blocks, into each of which a tiny black hole – a tiny void – had been carved. He continues to fill much larger spaces on gallery floors, dreaming up works of ever broader scope. He has made balloons the size of palaces (Leviathan from 2011), fired 12.5 tons of red wax, via a cannon, into the corner of the Royal Academy (in 2009) and wrapped 1,500 tons of steel into a sculpture, Orbit, commissioned for the 2012 London Olympics.
This extensive body of work has given Kapoor some of the art world’s biggest awards (he won the Turner Prize in 1991 and the Wilhelm Limbrock Prize last year) and numerous civilian honors (he is a Royal Academician, a French Commander of Arts and Letters and a Chevalier), and he was one of the nine artists, along with Constable and Shakespeare, placed on British passports by the UK government. 2015.
And with this plaudits — and his penchant for grand spectacle, which sometimes overwhelms him — also came criticism. People often either love or hate what they do. When Orbit was installed, some critics criticized Kapoor for what they saw as a “chaotic, meaningless, plutocratic game” and a “vanity project”. The idea that his work flaunts wealth and elitism is exacerbated by the exclusive license he obtained in 2016 to use Vantablack, a trademarked military paint said to be “the blackest black.” “We should be able to use it,” one painter said. “It’s not paint,” Kapoor told me today.
This distinctive — and controversial — ambition will now be on full display in Hayward. Viewers will be greeted with Kapoor’s latest piece, Everything, a red inflatable doll so large that it cannot be fully seen from any vantage point, as well as this year’s Ritual Expiation, floor sculptures resembling blood and entrails floating in handcrafted metal trays. There are also standout pieces: the disorienting black void of Descent into Limbo; And Mount Moriah at the ghetto gate, an upside-down mountain hovering just inches from the ground.
As I made my way through room after room following Kapoor, I was struck by the sheer scale of his output. He is a compulsive actor. Arriving at an upstairs room filled with painted concave mirrors, he explained that he had always had two sides to his practice. “One: These things, for some reason, the world, the market likes them. The other,” he said, referring to the massive pieces we passed downstairs, “which I never sold, not even one.” What he seeks is that “ah” moment, when the viewer experiences what he wants the piece to do. For example, these concave mirrors are designed and polished so that the painted image does not appear to exist on their surface, but rather hovers surrealistically in the empty space in front of it. There is also an optical illusion in the “black noir” works, as he calls them. Vantablack is said to absorb 99.965% of visible light, rendering all depth invisible. The works around me are all three-dimensional shapes. But look at them head-on and all you see is flat black. Ultimately, Kapoor says, it’s all about pressing that fundamental question of “Is this art?”
When asked if there were any Vantablack pieces that didn’t work, he replied, “Yes, but I’m not going to show them to you.” Likewise, when I asked him if I could see Hayward’s display model, he agreed on the condition that I not take any photographs. The photographer stays outside while Kapoor leads the way into another room filled with exhibition layout models—small preparatory models—hastily made from rough-sawn plywood and Styrofoam. “I didn’t show the model to anyone, or to any journalist at all,” he says.
This strange combination of freedom and control is clearly evident when we reach the drawing and painting room. “This is my space,” he says. Here he works alone.
The entire wall is covered in quick line drawings, paint splatters and potential titles. The words and phrases on display encompass a surprising range – from the political (“War is not won by the pain inflicted, but by the pain that can be endured”) and the poetic (“Memory of the Tongue”) to the downright meme (“I don’t make things, I show them”).
“I’ve always had dyslexia,” Kapoor says. He finds writing very difficult and trusts sculptural form more than language. However, language is a key element in deconstructing his work. Ha Makum – the address of the new mountainous plot – Means “place” in Hebrew. It is used in the traditional phrase spoken when mourners leave a home as they sit shiva (the Jewish ritual of grief) praying to God to comfort them. “Makum in the kabbalistic language literally means ‘place’. But it’s also one of the names of God. I love that strange juxtaposition,” Kapoor says.
“It’s weird to have a Hebrew surname,” he continues. “Especially now. But hopefully you can get past these questions.”
But using a Hebrew word He is You, I say.
He replied: “Yes, it is. It is me.” “I mean I have a deep problem with politics, disgusting politics,” he says, referring to the current Israeli government. “But what do you do?”
Kapoor has never shied away from politics. Recently, he collaborated with Greenpeace activists to install a huge canvas, splattered with red paint, on a gas platform in the North Sea. He has also spoken out against voter ID laws, funding cuts to culture, Brexit, and the UK government’s treatment of Shamima Begum. Today, he criticizes the UK government’s approach to pro-Palestine demonstrators. As he told me: “Is it illegal to protest pro-Palestine? Hello? Sorry, what’s wrong with everyone? Are you arresting them? It’s outrageous. And on so many levels, our ability to speak out is being curtailed: that idiot in America, that despicable man in India, etcetera, not to mention Israel. What a shame.”
His relationship with Israel is complex. He was born in what is now Mumbai, India. His father, Darshan Chander Kapoor, an admiral and hydrographer in the Indian Navy, was culturally Hindu. His mother, Hilda, whose real name was Hilda Murad Elias, was from a prominent family in the Iraqi Jewish diaspora. His grandfather was a synagogue player in Pune, and for a time in Bombay.
His parents, he says with great warmth, were “wonderfully cosmopolitan.” “We grew up with this strong sense of being Jewish and not being Jewish.” Spiritually speaking, he has been a long-time Buddhist.
When he was 16 years old, he and his brother immigrated to Israel. He says it was a “confusing and bewilderingly complex” time. “We were the ‘Jewish boys’ in India and then we went to Israel, me and my brother, and suddenly they called us.”Kochi“” – a racial slur. “I can’t tell you how shocking that was, if you like, ‘Black Jews’.”
He soon arrived in the UK in 1973 to attend art school (first at Hornsey College of Art and then at Chelsea School of Art and Design), and here too, the distance between his identity and how others boxed him in was completely unhelpful. His early pigment works are understood through the exotic lens of his Indian heritage. His Indian nationality was also a stumbling block for some when he was selected to represent Britain in Venice. In 2015 a controversial work He installed the “Dirty Corner” in Versailles, and it was repeatedly vandalized with fascist and anti-Semitic graffiti. He refused to remove it the second time, describing it at the time as “really violent” and a “scar.”
Despite this, Kapoor has consistently refused to let what he calls “autobiography” define his work (“I’m not Tracey Emin!” he told curator Nicholas Baum in 2008) and has no time for increasingly mainstream ideas. The practice of art is read through the lens of personal autobiography.
Museums around the world, he says, have become obsessed with this “weird, I think, a little nonsense” belief that you can only make work about your narrow identity: so, for example, only female artists can make female art. “Fui,” he says. “We can inhabit other countries, in various ways. This is one of the beauties of human consciousness, and I think it is a great harm to imprison the artist.” He goes to museums, he says, “to be surprised, to be surprised, to inspire some wonder.”
In the face of a world on fire, people are increasingly wondering where all the radical artists have gone. Kapoor, as this retrospective demonstrates, never gave up on his dream that art could be just that.
Here he was, 72 years old, doing something new that was unlike anything he’d done before and surprising himself with new ideas he’d been working on for decades. The challenge, he says, is for the artist to somehow combine personality (what he calls “my little story”) with the pursuit of artistic reinvention — and a rebellious mentality. He points to the three words he clings to the wall of his studio: I disagree, I disobey, I disavow. “Maybe it’s my naughty schoolboy attitude to things. But I think it’s really important. Disobedience goes hand in hand with invention. It’s radical, and I think it’s vital.”
Anish Kapoor is at the Hayward Gallery, London, on June 16October 18.
© Anish Kapoor. All rights reserved, DACS, 2026
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