Anish Kapoor (born 1952) is a Turner Prize winning sculptor. Kapoor was born in Bombay (Mumbai), India, and attended the Doon School, located in Dehra Dun, India. He moved to England in 1972, where he has lived since. He studied art, first at the Hornsey College of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art Design.

In the early 1980s, Kapoor emerged as one of a number of British sculptors working in a new style and gaining international recognition for their work (the others included Richard Wentworth, Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley and Bill Woodrow). Kapoor works in London, although he frequently visits India and has acknowledged that his art is inspired by both Western and Eastern cultures. His art historical influences include: Mantegna, Beuys, Barnett Newman and Yves Klein.

Kapoor's pieces are frequently simple, curved forms, usually monochromatic and brightly coloured. Most often, the intention is to engage the viewer, evoking mystery through the works' dark cavities, awe through their size and simple beauty, tactility through their inviting surfaces and fascination through their reflective facades. His early pieces rely on powder pigment to cover the works and the floor around them. This practice was inspired by the mounds of brightly coloured pigment in the markets and temples of India. His later works are made of solid, quarried stone, many of which have carved apertures and cavities, often alluding to, and playing with, dualities (earth-sky, matter-spirit, lightness-darkness, visible-invisible, conscious-unconscious, male-female and body-mind). His most recent works are mirror-like, reflecting or distorting the viewer and surroundings.
Since the end of the 1990s, Kapoor has produced a number of large works, including Taratantara (1999), a 35 metre-tall piece installed in the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead, England before renovation began there and Marsyas (2002), a large work of steel and PVC that was installed in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. A stone arch by Kapoor is permanently placed at the shore of a lake in Lodingen in northern Norway. In 2000, one of Kapoor's works, Parabolic Waters, consisting of rapidly rotating coloured water, was shown outside the Millennium Dome in London. In 2001, Sky Mirror, a large mirror piece that reflects the sky and surroundings, was commissioned in Nottingham. In 2004, Cloud Gate, a 110-ton stainless steel sculpture, was unveiled at Millennium Park in Chicago. In the Fall of 2006, another large mirror sculpture, also enititled Sky Mirror, was shown in Rockefeller Center, New York. Soon to be completed are a memorial to the British victims of 9/11 in New York,[1] and the design and construction of a subway station in Naples, Italy. In 2007, Kapoor showed Svayambh, a 1.5 metre carved block of red wax that moved on rails through the Nantes Musée des Beaux-Arts as part of the Biennale estuaire. Kapoor's recent work increasingly blurs the boundaries between architecture and art.

Biographical information from Wikipedia