The Palazzo Priuli Manfrin, in Venice, was bought four years ago by the artist Anish Kapoor. It was constructed in the sixteenth century for the aristocratic Priuli family, but it is thanks to the efforts of a later owner, Girolamo Manfrin, that the palazzo has its storied place in Venetian art history. Manfrin was an outsider from Dalmatia—born “in the midst of mud and shit,” as one detractor put it—who amassed a fortune in the tobacco trade. He bought the palazzo, which featured a ballroom with a thirty-foot-high frescoed ceiling, in the late seventeen-eighties. Manfrin wanted to decorate his new home with “pictures of the highest quality,” but, not being a connoisseur, he had advisers find him paintings by such masters as Mantegna, Giorgione, and Tiepolo. Manfrin boasted of acquiring masterpieces “without paying any attention to the expense involved,” and his expenditures had the desired result: the palazzo became a required destination for any cultivated visitor to Venice, and remained so after his death, in 1801. Three decades later, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote that “the collection is in every respect magnificent, and deserves many visits.”
Manfrin’s art was sold off in the late nineteenth century, with many works going to Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia. Thereafter, the palazzo changed hands repeatedly, and eventually fell into dilapidation. By the end of the twentieth century, the building was serving as a convent for a community of nuns, who had converted its upper floors into monastic cells. By 2012, it was deserted and on the market for twenty million euros: a crumbling fixer-upper with faded frescoes and a courtyard that, if not quite filled with mud and shit, was prone to frequent flooding.
Kapoor, who was born in Mumbai in 1954, and has lived in Britain since the early seventies, is the kind of blue-chip artist who, had he been working in the eighteenth century, might have sold some pieces to Manfrin’s advisers. Kapoor is best known for works that explore the interplay of mass and void, and for beguiling experiments with optics. His sculptures induce both awe and disquiet. His mirrored works—in particular, concave disks that measure several feet across and cast complex patterns of reflection—have regularly been snapped up by collectors at art fairs ever since he started making them, in the late eighties. The mirror sculptures not only create a destabilizing aura; they reflect light and sound in ways that tend to enhance whatever room they are displayed in. Museums and foundations have an equally large appetite for what Kapoor calls “non-objects”—such as twisted stainless-steel works so reflective that their shapes are hard to discern—and also for sculptures, made from natural materials like sandstone or alabaster, that are punctured with mysterious holes.
Although these signature pieces are alluring, some of Kapoor’s work is alarming, even repulsive. For an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, in London, in 2009—the first solo show there by a living artist—he presented “Grayman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked,” an array of lumpy forms made from coils of concrete extruded from a 3-D printer. Kapoor’s working title for this installation was “Between Shit and Architecture.” In 2015, the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, displayed his “Internal Object in Three Parts,” a triptych of canvases thickly encrusted with red and white silicone that evoked freshly slaughtered viscera. One of his most celebrated works, “Shooting Into the Corner,” consists of a cannon that fires off bucket-size cannisters of blood-colored wax at regularly timed intervals; Kapoor has spattered the walls of many a museum with his gory goop.
Kapoor has often embraced the challenge of working on an enormous scale. In 2002, he became the third artist to receive a commission from the Tate Modern, in London, to create an installation for the gigantic Turbine Hall, part of a former power station. In collaboration with the architect and engineer Cecil Balmond, Kapoor installed a vast red membrane—manufactured in France, by a company that usually makes coverings for sports stadiums—then stretched it over and between three giant steel rings. The work, which fully occupied the daunting space, was titled “Marsyas”—an allusion to the myth, also depicted by Titian, in which a satyr is flayed for defying Apollo. Even for those visitors for whom the reference was unfamiliar, the work still packed a wallop. “It looked like some part of the body, except you were not really sure what it was,” Donna De Salvo, who curated the installation, and is now at the dia Foundation, in New York, told me. “Anish’s view of things is deeply rooted in the physical, the bodily, the psychological, and in how those things intersect.” In 2009, in Kaipara, New Zealand, he inserted an even larger steel-and-membrane sculpture, “Dismemberment, Site I,” into a hilly landscape; shaped like a double-sided trumpet, the work, which is more than eighty feet tall, resonates with the wind.
These large pieces were praised for creating in the viewer an almost terrifying sense of immersion—and an inescapable confrontation with mortality. Some of Kapoor’s creations, however, can tip over into bombast. In 2010, in preparation for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, he was commissioned to make the U.K.’s tallest public work of sculpture: the ArcelorMittal Tower, named for the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, who helped finance its construction. Designed in concert with Balmond, and three hundred and seventy-six feet in height, it is a swirling network of red-painted steel tubes that might, poetically, be said to resemble the arterial system of the flayed Marsyas; the sculpture was more commonly compared to a tangled hookah pipe. One wit dubbed it the Eyeful Tower. In 2015, in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, Kapoor installed a colossal structure, resembling a funnel laid on its side, fabricated from Corten steel. He declared that the work, titled “Dirty Corner,” was “very sexual”—something that could be said of much of his œuvre. The sculpture appalled rather than seduced many onlookers, though, and vandals repeatedly covered it in graffiti. The French press renamed the work “le vagin de la reine.”
“The truth of the matter is that I sell a good bit of work each year, and that allows me to keep going with ambition, and to do stupid things like buy a bloody palazzo,” Kapoor told me when we met in Venice, in early April. Bureaucracy and the pandemic had hampered efforts, initiated last fall, to ready the Palazzo Manfrin for its new incarnation: the home of the Anish Kapoor Foundation. The Omicron variant sickened various people working on the restoration, and a small earthquake had revealed the frescoes’ fragility. Though the palazzo remained in a raw state, in mid-April Kapoor was planning to open it to the public for the first time in more than a century, as part of an expansive project curated by Taco Dibbits, the general director of the Rijksmuseum: an exhibition spread across two venues, with works shown at the Palazzo Manfrin and also at the Accademia, where Kapoor would be the first British artist to be honored with a solo show.
A few weeks before the exhibition was to open, the Palazzo Manfrin was mired in construction, so I met Kapoor at the Accademia. He is slight of build and light on his feet, with a boyish demeanor and smooth, unlined skin belied by silvery, swept-back hair. He wore sneakers, black pants, and a turquoise cashmere sweater. Around us, Venetian workmen were making slow progress on the exhibition. “I’m worried, because the lighting guys have got to get their bloody equipment in here,” Kapoor told me, casting a wary eye up to the antiquated beams overhead. He has a sonorous voice, with the kind of English accent that echoes in the halls of private schools and in the upper reaches of the Foreign Office. When he laughs, which is quite often, he verbalizes the act: “Ha-ha-ha!” Addressing the workers, Kapoor was upbeat: “Formidabile! Ho visto che cambia totalmente.” Turning back to me, he confided, “I’m fearless—I’ll speak any bloody language. Ha-ha-ha!”
“Shooting Into the Corner” was once again being exhibited, though without ongoing shooting into any corners: Kapoor had decided that the work should be set up with an already discharged arsenal, the cannon’s barrel aimed toward a small room that was knee-deep with gloppy red deposits, as though it were Bluebeard’s chamber. So indelibly is Kapoor’s name associated with the wax’s hue—a dark red, more purple than orange—that the Ford Motor Company offers vehicles sprayed with what it calls, without his permission, Kapoor Red. (He’s suing. “Artists are continually being plagiarized by capitalism in its various forms,” he said. “We must fight back at every turn.”) Kapoor said that “Shooting Into the Corner” was “obviously very, very phallic, male in conversation with female,” adding, “It’s also throwing paint—so Pollock and Abstract Expressionism. And, obviously, it refers to Goya”—whose “The Third of May 1808,” at the Prado, depicts Spanish loyalists facing a Napoleonic firing squad.
Displayed on the opposite wall was “Pregnant White Within Me,” a scaled-up iteration of a groundbreaking work from 1992, “When I Am Pregnant.” Approached from the side, it was evidently a large ovoid bulge that extended seamlessly from the wall, at head height. Seen from the front, the bulge was much harder to detect: it seemed to have been absorbed back into the wall. “We’re in the middle of lighting it, trying to make it disappear,” Kapoor explained. The walls of a neighboring gallery were hung with various oil paintings: kinetic, angry abstractions in which a few figurative elements—a severed artery?—could be discerned. Kapoor has made paintings throughout his career, though he has rarely shown them. When the Modern Art Oxford recently mounted a show of Kapoor’s paintings alongside some viscera-inspired sculptural works, one visitor became so overwhelmed that he fainted.
For decades, Kapoor explained, he has been drawn to the symbolic potency of blood. “Men have no access to blood, and women do,” he said. “Menstruation is the way that blood and earth connect—how do men have access to blood? War, circumcision, and hunting. Those are the only ways.” He is persuaded by the conclusions of the British anthropologist Chris Knight, who thirty years ago argued that the first acts of culture—dance, song—were created by women who were isolating from men while menstruating together and smearing themselves ritually with red ochre. Kapoor said of Knight, “He’s bonkers, but I love him.” The paintings were concerned with sacrifice, he explained: in several of the works, a craggy form alluded to Mt. Sinai. “Moses performed the sacrifice, so to speak, on the golden calf, and then we have the dismantling of polytheism, and then we end up with this monotheistic patriarchy,” he said. At the far end of the gallery, Kapoor had smeared black and red pigment up the wall, and, at the base, collected a pile of dirt and rubble in which it was possible to identify the crumpled, soiled remains of a garment. “It’s another dirty corner,” he said. “It’s called ‘Death of the Artist’—and there are my overalls. Ha-ha-ha!” The title, he added, was far from a joke. “These works are all obviously sacrificial, let’s say,” he went on. “So why not me?”
It was in Venice that Kapoor first came to international prominence. At the 1990 Biennale, when he was thirty-six, he was selected to represent Britain. Among the sculptural works that he showed were “Void Field”—a room filled with rough-hewn blocks of Northumbrian sandstone, each of which had been bored with a hole lined with Prussian-blue pigment—and “A Wing at the Heart of Things,” which consisted of two massive, flattish pieces of slate that were similarly coated with blue pigment, like pieces of sky that had fallen to earth. (“A Wing at the Heart of Things” is now in the collection of the Tate.) More immediately understated, if hardly less technically complicated, was “The Healing of Saint Thomas,” a bloody gash in the gallery’s white wall which suggested not just the wound of Christ but also the minimalism of Lucio Fontana. (It has been reprised at the Accademia; as an experiment, Kapoor added a drip of blood from the wound, but he rejected the notion, and ten coats of paint were required to eliminate the mark.) At the Biennale, installing the sculptures demanded the costly reinforcing of not one but two floors of the British pavilion, after Kapoor changed his mind about the arrangement of his work, then changed it back. Despite the sculptures’ heft, they had a numinous quality, seeming to have arisen in place almost without the artist’s intervention. Photographers at the opening captured Giulio Andreotti, the Italian Prime Minister, leaning over one of the blocks in “Void Field” and peering into the cavity.
Critics praised Kapoor’s work for continuing the formal explorations of modernist sculpture while also citing his capacity for unironic spiritual suggestiveness. At a Biennale where the attention-getting gestures included pornographic sculptures in which Jeff Koons depicted himself having sex with his partner Ilona Staller, Kapoor’s work won plaudits both for its weightiness and for its ethereality. “I remember a sense in 1990 of people telling me what I was doing,” Kapoor recalled. “I thought that was most interesting, because it means that something I had been up to is out there, if you like, in the public psyche. So something shifted. That was perhaps most important.” Kapoor received commentators’ insights with equanimity: “Mostly, I thought, Yeah, I know what I am doing. How nice of you to recognize it.” In 1991, Kapoor won the Turner Prize, the U.K.’s most prestigious honor for contemporary art. Having renounced his Indian citizenship for British citizenship—his birth nation does not recognize dual nationality, and a British passport is a more convenient document for international travel—he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, in 2003, and knighted, a decade later, for services to culture.
Unlike Koons—with whom Kapoor shares, if nothing else, a predilection for flawless, shiny surfaces that are devilishly complex to fabricate—Kapoor’s themes are unapologetically sober, even old-school: God, man, woman, birth, death. “I do believe we are deeply religious beings,” Kapoor, who has practiced Zen Buddhist meditation for decades, told me. “The profound mystery of life—it’s banal to say it—is: ‘What happens when I die? Where was I before I was born?’ I think those are daft but actually bloody important questions.” He ranges freely among religious, mythological, and intellectual traditions; his work invokes Christian, Jewish, and Hindu symbolism. Sigmund Freud is never very far away. Kapoor is impatient with what he sees as the restrictive ethic of identity politics—a framework that might deem problematic a male artist’s attempt to inhabit or represent the feminine, or that might question the expression of an artist whose subject matter appears to be at odds with his own heritage or lived experience. “I have a huge problem with it,” he told me. “Black art can only be made by Black artists? Phooey. Phooey! The whole point of being an artist is this ability, or will, to project psychically into other ways of being, seeing, thinking. The banal political correctness of, if you like, ‘the origin of the author’? Oh, how tedious!”
Kapoor grew up in a prosperous neighborhood of Mumbai. He was the eldest of three boys. His father, who came from a Hindu Punjabi family, was a hydrographer in the Indian Navy. “When we were young children, he was often at sea, making maps,” Kapoor told me. “There were literally lines let down to measure the depths—making the invisible visible.” His mother, who painted in her spare time, also had her own business. “To say she was a clothes designer is going too far, but to call her a seamstress is too simple,” he said. She had emigrated from Iraq as an infant with her parents, who were Jewish refugees; her father became a cantor in a synagogue in Mumbai. Kapoor’s parents were cosmopolitan and modern. Ilan Kapoor, five years Anish’s junior, who is now a professor of development studies at York University in Toronto, told me, “We always had the sense that we were outsiders.” At home, the family spoke English rather than a local language, as the families of the boys’ classmates tended to do. “My father absolutely hated Hinduism, and we rarely went to a synagogue,” Kapoor said. In contrast, he was drawn to the diverse and ancient traditions that he saw around him. “Hinduism is deeply to do with ritual, with faith and belief,” he told me. “I thought it was fascinating to go to the temple and see all these innocent and not-so-innocent Indians with awe in their faces.”
In 1965, Kapoor’s father was promoted to the position of the Navy’s chief hydrographer, and the family moved from Mumbai to Dehradun, close to the foothills of the Himalayas. (The dry climate in Dehradun meant that map pages would not be warped by moisture, insuring more accurate renderings.) The city was the location of one of India’s most élite boarding schools, the Doon School. Kapoor and his brother Roy, who is a year younger, attended as day students; Kapoor, who is dyslexic, struggled with his studies, and loathed the place. “It was all about sports and seniority,” he said. “We had to get up at the crack of dawn and go and do gym, and my heart was not in one second of it. I was deeply disinterested, and not motivated. And I was, as I still am, deeply anti-authoritarian. My father, the admiral—we were at war with each other.” His mother was warm and loving, but he felt underestimated by her. “My mother once said to me, ‘Anish, you’d be a good deputy to someone,’ ” he told me. “She didn’t say it nastily, but it really offended me.”
When Anish was sixteen, he and Roy were sent to Israel to live on a kibbutz. Anish’s job was to look after the community’s ducks. “We were still children, really—naïve, innocent Indian boys,” he recalled. In India, the brothers’ Jewish identity had marked them as outsiders; in Israel, Anish discovered that their Indian heritage marked them as not Jewish enough. On the streets of Tel Aviv, they were subjected to racist chants. While in Israel, Anish suffered what he later recognized as a nervous breakdown. “I just became completely dysfunctional,” he told me. Roy, who is now an executive at a technology company in Toronto, told me, “We would be walking along the street, and he would say he didn’t know what was real and what was not real. He would gaze around, and shake, and start to cry.” It was then that Kapoor first went into psychoanalysis. (He now has weekly rather than daily sessions.) But he also received help from other sources. “I had an aunt who lived in Israel, and she had these weird, shamanistic predilections,” he recalled. When Kapoor’s mother went to Israel to visit her sons, the aunt commanded her, “Go back to India and get some earth, come back, and put it under Anish’s bed.” Kapoor told me, “I could cry, honestly—my mother, bless her, went to India, got some earth, and put it under my bed. And, in a way, it’s that ritual material that I have been working with ever since.”
Kapoor’s parents hoped that he would study to become an engineer in Israel; instead, he decided to become an artist, renting a studio and starting to make paintings. When he applied to Bezalel, the noted art school in Jerusalem, he was turned down, and he left the country in 1973, just before the Yom Kippur War. Kapoor hitchhiked across Europe, stopping in Monaco, where his parents had moved for his father’s work. In the principality, he told me, “I was getting stopped by the police for being dark-skinned and having long hair every five minutes—I’m sorry, but that’s just a fact.” (A few years ago, he returned to Monaco to receive an honor, and took the opportunity to inform Prince Albert II about the long-ago harassment.) Kapoor ended up in London, where he enrolled at the Hornsey College of Art—an environment that was both idealistic and radically leftist. “Artists would hang out, get stoned, chill out, go to the pub, go to the studio,” Kapoor recalled. “It was a completely different atmosphere, in terms of what it meant to do something in the world. It wasn’t a job. It was a mission. It was a thing you filled your life with.” London was cheap and increasingly cosmopolitan. Kapoor rented a studio for five pounds a month and made money, at Camden Lock Market, by selling jewelry made from bent spoons and forks.
Kapoor had imagined himself having a modest, bohemian existence, but this plan was undermined by his growing critical and commercial success. In the late seventies, he began sculpting biomorphic, convoluted forms that looked as if they were made entirely from heaps of bright-colored pigment. The series, titled “1000 Names,” was partly inspired by Kapoor’s first return visit to India, a decade after his departure; the sculptures’ colors and textures evoked the sacks of pigments sold in Mumbai markets for ritual use, and their powdery edges were formally innovative, bringing into question the boundary between painting and sculpture. In the course of Kapoor’s career, his pigment works have sometimes raised other questions: once, on the way to a show in Sicily, airport security guards briefly detained him, suspicious of his claim that the bags of white powder found in his luggage were paint.
In 1982, he was taken on by the influential Lisson Gallery, which already represented several British sculptors of his generation, including Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon. Like them, Kapoor often fabricated works from commonplace materials, such as Styrofoam and wood. But his use of powdered pigment was distinctive. Nicholas Logsdail, the gallery’s founder, told me, “The form was not necessarily that original, but the way he used the form was. His use of color pigment, and this very casual way of just letting it drop to the floor, rather than making it neat and tidy—I thought this had the potential to be some sort of art-historical breakthrough.” In 1984, a show of pigment works at the Gladstone Gallery, in Manhattan, sold out before it had even opened. John Russell, who reviewed the show for the Times, noted that Kapoor “has something of his native country in his use of deep and brilliant color,” adding, “The mustard yellows, the Yves Klein blue, the bright, sharp reds and the luxurious blacks remind us at once of a country in which color comes in the form of a dye, and not out of a tube.”
Critical reception of Kapoor’s work often focussed on his Indian ancestry, while sometimes paying less attention to other aspects of his artistic inheritance. Homi K. Bhabha, the Harvard professor and critical theorist, who has been a close friend of Kapoor’s for decades, told me, “In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, there was an obsession—a kind of cultural anxiety—to put a name and a place to a post-colonial diasporic artist’s inventiveness by emphasizing the authenticity of his or her cultural provenance. Anish’s work is often given an over-the-top mystical and mythological reading which doesn’t engage with the more worldly tensions to which it calls attention.” Post-colonial, diasporic artists, Bhabha went on, have a global provenance rather than a national identity: “They are in dialogue with Western art and artists while also being deeply in conversation with arts and artists across the global, post-colonial South.”
Kapoor told me that he “refused to accept that I am an ‘Indian artist,’ ” and went on, “In the age of the individual, creative potential is attributed to background culture. And you rob the individual of their creative contribution.” His relationship with his land of origin has been further complicated by the rise of Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, of whom Kapoor has been consistently critical. Last year, he wrote in the Guardian that Modi’s regime “bears comparison with the Taliban in Afghanistan, who also attempt to rule with ideological fervour,” adding, “The fascist government in India today is doing what the British could not. Modi and his neo-colonial henchmen are forcing Hindu singularity on the country.” Kapoor is no fonder of the outgoing British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, whose politics he sees as part of a dispiriting global trend rightward. (When Johnson was the mayor of London, Kapoor expressed his displeasure with him after Johnson commissioned the construction of a slide on the frame of the ArcelorMittal Tower, in order to make it a more alluring tourist attraction.)
“You look at Brazil, India, on and on—the first thing they go for is culture,” Kapoor told me. “Because they don’t want freethinking, open-minded conversation, and because images matter. It’s sad to see Britain go in this direction.” Kapoor has leveraged his renown in England to criticize everything from Brexit to the British government’s treatment of Shamima Begum—a British-born woman who was stripped of her citizenship in 2019, four years after she decided, as a fifteen-year-old, to leave London to join isis fighters in Syria. Now living in a refugee camp in northern Syria, Begum has borne and lost three children. “Here’s a sad young woman who was trafficked, effectively,” Kapoor told me. “Imagine a government that can arbitrarily remove your citizenship, if you have the wherewithal to get citizenship elsewhere, because you speak out against them. They could do the same to me tomorrow, frankly.”
Kapoor’s pigment sculptures were the beginning of his efforts to push materials to unexpected, apparently reality-defying extremes. “It is said that what you see is what you get, and I think art is exactly the opposite,” Kapoor once told the curator Nicholas Baume. “For me, the illusory is more poetically truthful than the ‘real.’ ” Greg Hilty, the curatorial director of the Lisson Gallery, told me, “There is a bit of a Wizard of Oz thing—Anish has never been afraid of fiction, and theatre.”
Over the years, the materials to which Kapoor has had access, and the transformative methods at his disposal, have become more sophisticated and extreme. He enlisted workers at a shipyard in Holland to manufacture “Hive,” a giant curved sculpture made from Corten steel. For “Svayambhu”—a Sanskrit word that means “self-generated”—Kapoor placed a huge, motor-propelled block of blood-colored wax on a track that passed through three identically sized doorways; the wax block squeezed through and spattered the doorways, suggesting that it had been “carved” into shape while moving back and forth. At an online roundtable last year, Nigel Schofield of MDM Props, the fabricator who helped Kapoor realize the work, said of the wax vehicle, “There’s a train underneath that, so you need engineering skills.”
An exploration of technological possibility underlies some of Kapoor’s works. Sometimes the results can seem merely slick; in other cases, novel tools help him reach for the sublime. The coils of concrete in “Grayman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked” were inspired by a heady conversation with Adam Lowe, the founder of Factum Arte, a Madrid studio that specializes in digitization. “Adam Lowe and I wondered if it were possible to make a machine that could generate form,” Kapoor wrote in “Unconformity and Entropy,” a 2009 book about the collaboration. “Once we had started making objects, a new reality began to emerge. These were objects like no others; they seemed to obscure the border between artifice and event. They are objects more akin to natural things than to those made by design.” In Kapoor’s studio, wet concrete was placed at predetermined coördinates via an elaborately programmed 3-D printer; in the book, Lowe describes the device as “a shit machine that farts and craps its way along its ordained path.” Eventually, Kapoor decided that computerizing the creative process was unnecessary; dressed in white overalls and surgical gloves, he wielded the nozzle himself.
Other Kapoor works display such exquisite technical refinement that they seem otherworldly. These are often achieved in collaboration with the thirteen technicians who work at Kapoor’s studio. Greg Hilty, of the Lisson Gallery, described the studio to me as a special atelier: many of Kapoor’s employees, including administrative staff, make and show art in their own right. “He has a group of people he has worked with for a really long time,” Hilty said. “And they know what he wants, and think what he thinks, to a certain degree. They have evolved with him, and they have helped him evolve his language.” Even when Kapoor’s works look as if they have been digitally manufactured or created with imaging software, they are often entirely analog—first sketched by Kapoor on paper or on the studio walls, then sculpted by hand, or by a variety of hands. Kapoor employs three stone carvers whose expertise can be imaginatively harnessed. Within the past two years, his studio has produced a trio of sculptures in which a wafer-thin rectangle or triangle of alabaster appears to be hovering, impossibly, in front of a rough-hewn block of the stone. In fact, each geometric figure has been painstakingly carved, by hand, from the solid block, to which it remains connected by a stem that is visible only if you peer at the sculpture from the side. Each piece in the series took between four and six months to make; conceptually, the works are on a continuum with earlier Kapoor sculptures in which forms are carved from the inside out, but the new pieces emerged from conversations with his team about the technical limits of stone carving. “They told me that you can just about get your hand in a seven-centimetre space—they could carve between the stone and the form in front,” Kapoor explained to me. “Can you believe it? Seven centimetres! We found tools that can do it. They found, we found. It’s a feat of patience and love and care.”
Other works achieve their mysterious effect through the construction of faux walls and floors. Kapoor once set a giant chromed-bronze sinkhole into a gallery floor, like a bathtub drain of the gods. A particularly notorious work is “Descent Into Limbo,” which was first displayed in 1992, and which gallerygoers have lined up to experience whenever it has been shown. It consists of a black hole on the floor of a small room to which several visitors at a time are admitted. Kapoor believes that “Descent Into Limbo” is his best work. In Venice, he told me, “It looks like a black carpet on the ground, not like a hole, but it is a space completely brimmed full of darkness.” (The work is fiendishly difficult to install, and is not being shown either at the Accademia or at the Palazzo Manfrin.) “It is frightening,” he continued. “Very frightening, because it’s a bloody deep, dark hole, but it’s also an object and not an object. ‘Descent Into Limbo’ is literally doing, if you like, what Apollinaire dares the artist to do—to go to the edge, fly or die.” Some visitors have taken this injunction literally: a few years ago, when “Descent Into Limbo” was shown at a gallery in Portugal, a man in his sixties fell in. “Poor fellow, he must have hurt himself so badly,” Kapoor said. “He spent three or four days in hospital.” How deep does the hole go? “To the center of the earth!” Kapoor told me. “Ha-ha-ha!”
“Come this way!” Kapoor called out, stepping lightly along the pavement outside his vast studio, in the Camberwell district of South London. It was a morning in early March, with six weeks to go before the opening of the shows in Venice, and members of the art-world press had been invited for a preview of some works that were to be exhibited. Having at first occupied a single warehouse on the street, Kapoor’s domain has extended to include all but one of the buildings on the block. Each structure is dedicated to a different fabrication process: mirrors in one, silicone works in the next. Nicholas Logsdail told me, “Each one is like a different compartment of his brain.”
Kapoor told his guests, “Now, this is a huge room with a very, very big object in it—come in one by one.” He opened a door to reveal a hangar-like space, the floor of which was almost entirely covered by what looked like an enormous mountain ridge formed of a material that resembled raw meat. His visitors, walking in single file along the narrow margin, stepped gingerly, like “Squid Game” contestants trying to avoid a gruesome fate. “Be careful of your backs—everything is covered in sticky red,” Kapoor cried. The warning came too late for a reporter from an Italian newspaper, whose overcoat already bore gooey evidence of a too close encounter with Kapoor’s œuvre.
The work had been created in less than three months. First, Kapoor made various sketches, four of which had been turned into models by his lead technician, Pablo Smidt, who has worked with him for nineteen years, and who stood by in the studio during Kapoor’s presentation, his white overalls stained with gore. (One member of Kapoor’s team told me that the sight of his technicians at work suggested “a production of ‘Julius Caesar’ after the assassination.”) After Kapoor was shown the models, he selected his chosen form, which Smidt had built by hand, working solo for about six weeks to make a fibreglass substructure, then applying blocks of color. The ultimate surface, which was made of resin mixed with paint, had been applied by Kapoor. “He is not someone coming in here and giving directions and going away,” Smidt told me later. “When it is the moment to work, he works like anybody else—or more.”
The work was to be installed in the entryway of the Palazzo Manfrin—though there it would be positioned on the ceiling, upside down, with the mountain’s peak almost touching the floor. Given the challenges of the space, which is divided by columns, Kapoor had decided that it would be more effective to attach a sculpture to the rafters than to place it on the floor. He had conceived of an upside-down mountain, thus “inverting the great Italian tradition of the painted ceiling.” The mountain, Kapoor admitted, was an act of bravado—one that he was not entirely sure would work at the Venice site. “As a general rule, I say that a work should not leave the studio for at least six months after it’s made,” he told me. “You just sit with it, watch it, look at it, understand whether it has a voice or not.” The meaty mountain would not have time to marinate, however: within a few days, it was to be sliced into thirteen more manageable blocks, which would be reassembled at the palazzo. Would it ultimately produce in its viewers the desired sense of dread and awe? “You’ll tell me when we get there,” he said.
In another studio was a body of work that had already made headlines without having ever been unveiled to the public: a series of objects coated with a substance called Vantablack. Several years ago, the British technology company Surrey NanoSystems announced that it had created the coating, which the company described as the darkest substance yet made by man; it is formed of very long, very narrow nanotubes of carbon that absorb virtually all the light falling on them. Although Vantablack was developed for use in space technology, hundreds of artists around the world approached Surrey NanoSystems about the coating, Kapoor among them. In 2016, Ben Jensen, the company’s founder and chief technology officer, made an exclusive deal with Kapoor for its artistic use. “Anish had some amazingly grand ideas on how to deliver and execute his art,” Jensen told me. “But we are governed somewhat by the capability in the laws of physics, and what we can actually do at the time. In the beginning, it was a learning process—what can Vantablack do, and how does that fit with his vision?” The deal did not further Kapoor’s popularity in the artistic community. “This black is like dynamite in the art world,” the artist Christian Furr said at the time. “It isn’t right that it belongs to one man.” Stuart Semple, a British artist whose practice includes manufacturing his own pigments, drew attention to Kapoor’s monopoly by marketing a “pinkest pink” pigment. You could buy it online, but only after confirming that “you are not Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated with Anish Kapoor, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate of Anish Kapoor.” More than one person I spoke with about Kapoor told me that he is not “an artists’ artist”—a reputation secured by the Vantablack affair.
The controversy had misrepresented the product, Kapoor wearily explained to his visitors. It was not a paint that could be squeezed from a tube or bought in a can; making Vantablack was a complex and expensive technological process. He led the group to the first of several glass cases—necessary protection, he explained, because Vantablack was both fragile and toxic. Inside the first case, mounted on a white background, was what looked at first sight like a velvety black square. The work, Kapoor explained, owed an obvious debt to Kazimir Malevich’s “Black Square”—a painting that was first exhibited in 1915—but it also referred to innovations in painting developed during the Renaissance. “There were two great discoveries in the Renaissance,” he said. “There’s the one we all hear about—perspective, which places the human being in the center, and the whole world recedes away. The other, just as important, is the fold: all those Renaissance paintings have endless folds.” He was referring to the intricately rendered fabrics in such paintings, which deepen the illusion of three-dimensionality. “What is the fold? It is, of course, a definition of being. It says being. It says person. Now, the strange thing about this material is that you put it on a fold, and you can’t see the fold.” He went on, “My proposition is that this material is therefore beyond being.”
When Kapoor’s visitors moved to the side of the glass case, what had appeared to be flat materialized into a three-dimensional, diamond-shaped geometric form. In other cases, black squares mysteriously puffed up into domes, or irregular bulbous growths, or, in one case, what looked faintly like a stovepipe hat hung on a peg. “It’s a trick, and it’s not a trick,” Kapoor said. “Isn’t art always about tricks? The whole endeavor of painting is to give appearance to objects.” On one of the glass cases, the side views of the object had been blocked off. “You can’t see it—it is a truly invisible object,” Kapoor declared, to uneasy chuckles from the onlookers. The only way the three-dimensionality of the object could be discerned—as the besmirched Italian reporter was the first to notice—was in its reflection in the glass. “There you go—using your eyes,” Kapoor said. “Ha-ha-ha!”
Sheena Wagstaff, the Leonard A. Lauder Chair for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum, later told me that these works—fabricated in what the artist has renamed Kapoor Black—“go straight to the heart of the matter, of the void.” She continued, “That series of work really undermines and shapes our assumptions of our own perception. The material is incredibly difficult to work with—it is literally zero sum—and he says, very candidly, ‘I am still working it out.’ ” Wagstaff went on, “That is kind of analogous to what all of us are doing in our lives—we’re all working it out. It sounds flippant, but it’s actually super-profound. He touches on the uncertainty we all feel about the tangibility of our existence.”
The black works were another iteration of Kapoor’s long-standing investigation of what he calls “the space of painting”—a project on which he elaborated after leading his audience into another giant studio. The room was filled with the works with which he is most firmly identified: the mirrored disks of stainless steel. Sotheby’s auctioned off one model, finished with copper alloy and lacquer, for upward of a million dollars. “It’s something he does incessantly,” Greg Hilty, of the Lisson Gallery, told me, estimating that Kapoor’s studio produces perhaps thirty of the disks a year. (Kapoor later disputed this number, but he did not provide a correction, calling it “completely irrelevant.”) They are fabricated off-site, steel-working being one of the few processes involved in making Kapoor’s œuvre which cannot be done at his studio. Once manufactured, the mirrors are sent to the studio and painted or treated with the assistance of a technician who has worked for years with Kapoor in developing finishing techniques.
The surfaces of the mirrors on display had been treated to achieve various unusual effects. One had been gauzed with a ghostly greenish gray. Another shimmered with golden light. All of them did peculiar things to whoever or whatever was reflected in them, with the images flipping and reversing at unexpected moments. “Think about painting,” Kapoor said. “The space of painting is always, without exception, from the picture frame, deep beyond.” The mirrors created “a confused double space between image and concavity.” He went on, “My idea is that it’s deeply radical—that it looks at painting in a completely different way. Who knows? If it is, it is. If it isn’t, it isn’t.”
Kapoor’s mirrored pieces are the primary source of his considerable personal fortune. In addition to the Palazzo Manfrin, Kapoor owns an apartment in Venice; a place in the Bahamas; a fourteen-and-a-half-thousand-square-foot town house in central London, which is currently on the market for twenty-three million dollars; and a country house outside Oxford, which is where he spent most of the pandemic. (Kapoor has three children: a son and a daughter, both in their twenties, from his first marriage, to Susanne Kapoor, an art historian; and a toddler daughter with his second wife, Sophie Walker, a garden designer.)
“Artists have to be sophisticated about two things—one is so-called fame, and the other is money,” Kapoor told me in Venice. “The art world is an arm of the capitalist machine. It is very, very hard for us artists, successful artists especially, to live on that fine line between what money makes possible, and not to be seduced into making works that sell.” Had he ever been seduced? “I am going to be so bold as to say no, even though I have bodies of work that are extremely successful,” Kapoor told me. “However, I also have these huge other bodies of work that never sell, rarely sell—that take much more commitment, that are much, much more difficult. I have always had these two sides to my practice.” He sounded a bit like a Hollywood actor who alternates Marvel movies with indie dramas. Kapoor continued, “I have to be realistic about it and say, ‘All right, that’s what happens. I can do it, so long as I am exploring real new territory. If it is just repeating what I have done before—boring.’ It is a hard line to remain clear about.”
The distracting and beguiling surfaces of Kapoor’s mirrors are recapitulated at bravura scale in “Cloud Gate,” at Chicago’s Millennium Park. Kapoor’s most celebrated public work, the sculpture, which is popularly known as the Bean, cost twenty-three million dollars to make, and consists of more than a hundred tons of highly polished steel that, despite its weight, seems to hover above the ground like a drop of mercury that is about to splatter. When it débuted officially, in 2006, it was immediately acclaimed. The work predates Instagram but seems made for it: hundreds of thousands of images of it exist on the platform, many of them featuring a grinning selfie-taker. Not every critic is transported by “Cloud Gate.” Hal Foster, the Princeton art historian and critic, told me, “When I walk by, I feel like one of those apes in ‘2001,’ before the monolith—all excited, but by what, exactly?” He added, “There’s no spaceship after the jump cut. It’s seductive, spectacular, then poof! Nothing, except a gawking crowd.”
Kapoor told me that he was initially dismayed by the crowds the Bean attracted: “I saw all these pictures with all these people, and I thought, Oh, no, bloody Disneyland! Is that what I have done?” He went to Chicago and spent several days in the orbit of the sculpture, looking at it and watching the reactions of fascinated visitors. “I wondered, What is it?” he said. “Then I realized it is something about its scale. When you are standing near it, it looks like a really big thing. When you are not so near it, it doesn’t look like such a big thing at all. You don’t have to be very far away, and suddenly the scale shifts.” The absence of visible joints means that there is nothing by which a viewer can gauge the object’s size, “so it does this strange thing of shifting scale—I thought, Phew, that saves it.” Kapoor went on, “I hope it retains a certain mystery, in spite of being touched and photographed endlessly. I think that, in the end, is the key. It is worth spending your life making an object or two that are truly mysterious. Wow! There aren’t many—even in art, there aren’t many. In the universe, there are a few.”
There may shortly be one more: a mini-Bean is soon to be unveiled in New York. Work started on it three years ago, but the process was delayed, in part, by pandemic restrictions—for a year and a half, a travel ban on foreign visitors prevented Kapoor’s specialized technicians from entering the country. The new sculpture, which is about half the size of the Chicago version, has not been placed in a public plaza. The work has been squeezed, with not a millimetre to spare, under the awning of the so-called Jenga Tower—Herzog and de Meuron’s luxury residential tower in Tribeca. It is a “Cloud Gate” for the Manhattan equivalent of a gated community.
With just two weeks before the official opening of the exhibition in Venice, the Palazzo Manfrin still resembled a construction site, and Kapoor and his team had the frantic aspect of homeowners undergoing a renovation whose contractor has informed them that the kitchen countertops will not, after all, be installed before Thanksgiving. At least the work on the façade had been completed, making it look as pristine as one of Kapoor’s mirror works. But around the back, where scaffolding had been erected, a hole had been punched into a wall two stories up, to permit the installation of several large works with a crane. The only other entrance to the building was through a decrepit lavatory with stinking urinals, evoking that darker, filthier dimension of Kapoor’s work: shit and architecture.
The lead architect of the renovation, Giulia Foscari, whose firm, UNA, had been responsible for the palazzo’s renaissance, was circling. Kapoor’s team, accustomed to working under extreme circumstances, were doing their best amid the chaos. Pablo Smidt was on a ladder in the entrance hall, attaching sections of Kapoor’s inverted mountain to the ceiling, its fibreglass innards temporarily on display. The thirteen chunks of sculpture had been ferried to the palazzo by boat, under the cover of night. At 3 a.m., when one section was found to be fractionally too large to fit through the front door, Smidt reluctantly left it outside, so that a slice could be slivered off. An adjoining ground-floor room was filled with piles of dun-colored sand. Upstairs, on the piano nobile, Kapoor’s triptych “Internal Object in Three Parts” had been mounted on the dilapidated walls of a salon overlooking the canal; the piece’s silicone slabs, still wrapped in plastic, resembled prepackaged cuts of meat at a supermarket.
In the palazzo’s southern wing, restoration work had been completed some weeks earlier on the frescoed ceiling, where eighteenth-century cherubs and scantily robed goddesses gallivanted on high. But the marble floors were grubby, and the installation of works that needed to be kept scrupulously dust-free had been held up by workmen, hammering and drilling. In Girolamo Manfrin’s spectacular ballroom, a vast circular canvas had been elevated on a scaffold; the cloth, part of a work called “Symphony for a Beloved Sun,” was yet to be covered with red paint, thus undergoing the transubstantiation from hardware to art. A team of cleaners who had been contracted to quell the mess had been struck by COVID. When Kapoor arrived at the site that day, he was horrified by the state of progress, his voice quivering with anger, all bonhomie dispelled. There was the wrong kind of dirt in all the wrong corners.
By opening day, however, the magic trick had been pulled off. When the palazzo’s front door opened to its first twenty-first-century visitors, all the sweat and struggle that it had taken to put the art works in place had evaporated. Kapoor’s resin mountain—now given a proper name, “Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto”—loomed ominously downward from the rafters of the entrance hall—almost, but not quite, touching the concrete floor. Only the very youngest visitor, a grade schooler brought by his parents, detected the trapdoor concealed within the inverted peak; the aperture would allow a technician to climb inside the sculpture and, if necessary, adjust its positioning.
In the neighboring gallery, the brown sand had become a desolate, blood-red landscape. Mounted on top of it was a mechanical digger that had been coated in blue pigment. The work, titled “Destierro”—Spanish for “exile”—was a metaphor for displacement that harked back to Kapoor’s formative preoccupations. At the Palazzo Manfrin, it could be compared with one of his earliest works, a pigment piece from 1982 called “White Sand, Red Millet, Many Flowers.” Displayed in an unrestored salon upstairs, its vivid piles of color created a thrilling contrast to the room’s dingy, water-damaged walls.
The hole at the rear of the palazzo was now concealed by drywall, making it impossible to tell how “Vertigo”—a curved slice of mirrored steel from 2006—had shouldered its way into an adjacent room, which it almost entirely filled. In another room, a new work—an angled hunk, almost twenty feet in length, of what appeared to be Corten steel—looked so massive that it was hard to figure out how the floor beneath it hadn’t given way. (In fact, it was made from painted fibreglass: another theatrical trick.) Its form was divided by a deep crevice shaped like a vulva, around the opening of which were gobs and smears of blood-colored silicone. The piece was titled “Split in Two Like a Fish for Drying,” but it might equally have been called “When I Am on My Period.”
Some of the infamous black works were on display for the first time—and, surprisingly, they were among the least arresting objects in the palazzo. They had trouble holding their own amid the dramatically decayed galleries showing the more violent and grotesque products of Kapoor’s imagination. In their glass cases, the black works brought to mind the velvet busts that are displayed in a jeweller’s window—but the sparkle of diamonds was missing. (At the Accademia, a chapel-like space had been dedicated to other black works, and they were arranged more powerfully there, suggesting in their mysterious depth the concentrated power of the gilded medieval icons on display elsewhere in the museum.)
The installation at the Palazzo Manfrin would remain in place for six months, after which restoration of the mansion would resume, under the eye of Mario Codognato, the Kapoor Foundation’s director. A bookshop and a café were planned, alongside gallery space that could be used for temporary exhibitions. Space on the upper floors might be shared with an academic institution.
Despite having made the grand gesture of acquiring a Venetian palazzo to house a foundation in his name—an impressive answer to the question “Where do I go when I die?”—Kapoor insisted that he was not preoccupied with posterity. “Legacy is such a problematic, ego-driven thing—I’ve got a big-enough ego already,” he told me a few days after the opening, when we met for coffee at a café in Venice’s ghetto. An artist’s work has to fight its own space, he argued: “It has to go out in the world and survive whatever it is—criticism, adoration, whatever else. I don’t believe that artists can falsely make that happen. So that’s the problem with projects like this”—he gestured in the direction of his palazzo, across the canal. What did give him satisfaction, he acknowledged, was the irrefutable statement that his possession of the Palazzo Manfrin made about his cultural power in the present. “I think it’s important to say, if you like, that an artist of nonwhite origin can do something as bold as this,” he said. “Whether it’s legacy, or not legacy, who cares?”
In the grand ballroom where Girolamo Manfrin had once entertained the cream of Venetian society, the looming, elevated disk had finally been colored red. The floor beneath it was ankle-deep in yet more gory lumps of blood-colored wax. In a corner, incongruous amid the faux carnage, stood a battered Madonna painted in plaster. When Kapoor showed me around the palazzo, he explained that the statue had formerly been displayed on a pedestal between the ballroom’s grand windows, having been set there by the nuns who inherited the space after the Palazzo Manfrin’s guests had departed forever.
Stroking the Madonna’s chipped hand, Kapoor told me that the statue had been retrieved from storage and put in place only a few days earlier. Her presence, he felt, completed the show. The Madonna’s face was serene and haloed by a ring of stars, like the perfect circle of one of Kapoor’s celestial mirrors. But Kapoor directed my attention, instead, to her feet. She appeared to be balanced atop a globe, with one bare foot positioned on the neck of a snake with gaping red jaws. “Here she is, the lady of benevolence, if you like, standing on the neck of—squeezing to death—the old world, the world of the shaman, the creature from the earth,” he said. “Which is what all these works are about. A snake! What else? Ha-ha-ha!” ♦
An earlier version of this article imprecisely quoted Anish Kapoor’s article in the Guardian.
