SirSir Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor makes objects that pick a fight with the human eye — mirrored surfaces that swallow whole cities, voids painted so completely black that the surface seems to vanish into a hole, mounds of raw pigment that look cut from some other, more saturated dimension — and he has carried that argument from a Bombay childhood to the very summit of contemporary art. He belongs on this Roll as the diaspora's most monumental artist, a sculptor whose lifelong preoccupations — presence and absence, the whole and the void, the space between things — read, at a distance, like a meditation on the diasporic condition itself.

A doubly diasporic childhood

He was born in Bombay in 1954 into an unusually layered heritage. His father was a Punjabi Hindu, a hydrographer in the Indian Navy; his mother was from an Iraqi-Jewish family, and her own father had served as the cantor of the synagogue in Pune. Kapoor thus grew up inside two minority histories at once, Hindu and Jewish, Indian and Middle Eastern, and the sense of belonging to several worlds and none completely would mark his art and his refusal, throughout his career, of any single national label.

London and the pigment pieces

In the early 1970s, as a young man, Kapoor moved to Britain and trained at the Hornsey College of Art and the Chelsea School of Art. He emerged into the London art world of the early 1980s and announced himself with a series of sculptures dusted in loose, brilliant pigment — deep cobalt, crimson, saffron yellow — powders that pooled around the forms and seemed to make the colour itself a physical substance. Critics read the works as both rigorously minimalist and unmistakably Indian in their palette and ritual charge, though Kapoor himself has always resisted the reduction of his art to his origins.

Venice, the Turner, and the void

Recognition came quickly. In 1990 he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, and in 1991 he won the Turner Prize, the country's most prominent contemporary-art award. Through the 1990s his work turned increasingly to the void — carved recesses and painted hollows that appeared bottomless, playing on the eye's inability to read depth, drawing the viewer toward a darkness that seemed to have no floor. The concerns were almost metaphysical: what it means for something to be present or absent, solid or empty, there or not-there.

Conquering public space

Then Kapoor did something few gallery artists manage: he mastered public space on a colossal scale. Cloud Gate, the vast, seamless mirrored form in Chicago's Millennium Park that the whole world calls "the Bean," reflects the city's skyline and, every day, several million visitors' own faces back at them; it may be the most photographed and most genuinely beloved public artwork of the century. Marsyas, a single sweeping membrane of red, filled the entire Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. And for the 2012 London Olympics he designed the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a looping red observation tower that joined his art to the steel of another figure on this very Roll, Lakshmi Mittal, who financed and supplied it.

The blackest black

Kapoor also became the art world's most notorious monopolist of colour. He acquired the exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack, one of the darkest substances ever made, a coating that absorbs almost all visible light and makes any surface look like a two-dimensional hole. The exclusivity enraged other artists, and one, Stuart Semple, retaliated by creating the "world's pinkest pink" and banning Kapoor alone from buying it — a gleeful, long-running art-world feud that delighted the public and said something about Kapoor's appetite for control over his materials.

Honours and later work

He was knighted in 2013 for services to the arts, and has exhibited in the grandest settings, from the gardens of Versailles to the great museums of the world, often courting controversy — a blood-red installation, a monumental sculpture vandalised, a running argument about scale and provocation. He works between London and Venice, and his studio operates at the scale of a small industrial enterprise, fabricating works of enormous engineering complexity.

Why the Roll remembers him

Kapoor belongs on this Roll because he reached the absolute summit of the Western contemporary-art world — the Biennale, the Turner Prize, the knighthood, the defining public monuments of two great cities — as an artist who was formed by, but never confined to, his Indian and Jewish origins. His work refuses easy identity even as it is saturated with the questions identity raises. And in Cloud Gate, he gave a great American city an object that does the most diasporic thing imaginable: it takes everyone who stands before it, of every origin, and folds their reflection into a single curved, shining, borderless surface. The boy from two minority histories in Bombay became the sculptor whose work millions touch, and see themselves in, every year.

The provocateur

Kapoor's monumental public work has repeatedly courted, and generated, controversy. His vast sculpture Dirty Corner, installed in the gardens of Versailles in 2015, was widely reported under a cruder nickname and was twice defaced, once with antisemitic graffiti; Kapoor initially chose to leave the vandalism visible as a statement about intolerance before a court intervened. His work Descension, a perpetual black whirlpool of water, and the enormous Leviathan at the Grand Palais in Paris, pushed his fascination with the void toward the sublime and the unsettling. His feud over the exclusive rights to the blackest black pigment, Vantablack, ran for years as a genuine art-world saga.

The political artist

Kapoor has also been unusually willing, for an artist of his commercial standing, to take political positions. He has spoken out against Brexit and against the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, criticising the politics of his birth country's governing movement, and he has used his work and his platform to argue for pluralism and against the hardening of national and religious borders — themes that echo the preoccupation with edges, thresholds and the space between things that runs through all his sculpture. A member of the Royal Academy and the subject of major retrospectives from London to Venice, he continues to work between his studios in London and Italy, fabricating objects of enormous engineering complexity. He belongs on this Roll as the diaspora's most monumental artist: the boy from two minority histories in Bombay who reached the summit of the Western art world and gave two great cities the mirrored and the crimson forms that millions now touch, photograph, and see themselves reflected in.