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Anish Kapoor Reflects

May 7, 2012 by Marion Maneker

Jackie Wullschlager has Anish Kapoor to Lunch with the FT and gets this deep background on his path to becoming an artist:

Kapoor’s maternal family came from Baghdad, emigrating to India where his grandfather was cantor of the Pune synagogue – I question him about his mother.

“My mother? Oh God, don’t ask! God knows!” he answers hastily, adding without enthusiasm, “It was a great childhood.” The oldest of three brothers, Kapoor left India at 17 for Israel: “My parents were very cosmopolitan, we grew up with Judaism as a cultural reality, a family reality, rather than a religious one – which is right, I believe in that.”

Initially, he lived on a kibbutz, then studied engineering before realising “it really wasn’t for me, it was too tight. I went back to the kibbutz and decided I had to be an artist. I got myself a little studio and made some really bad paintings. My parents weren’t over the moon. I was so young and so naive. I’d hardly looked at any art, hardly ever seen a painting. Then I came to art school [Hornsey College of Art] in London and felt utterly liberated. They were very difficult years emotionally, but in a way I’m grateful for them. It took me many years of psychoanalysis to get over it.”

Was the problem a standard coming-of-age neurosis? Kapoor looks vaguely amused at this understatement. “Er, no. It was much, much, much more than that. It was a sense of disorientation, not culturally, but with myself, which I needed to live with, understand, be less afraid of. Perhaps I was also coming to terms with an idea that I wanted to do something. No – wait, it’s difficult to find the right words – a sensation that I had something to do, but I didn’t know how to do it and didn’t know if I could allow myself to do it.

“The first years when I was making art, I felt as if I didn’t exist if I didn’t work. Now I don’t. The work got better when I didn’t feel that. Now I’ve allowed the work to be the work, I can be me, and somehow we can live together.”

 Lunch with the FT: Anish Kapoor (Financial Times)

Engineers: Unsung Sculptors of Our Age?

April 6, 2010 by Marion Maneker

Alistair Souke makes this interesting point in his Telegraph profile of Anish Kapoor and his recently announced landmark commission, the ArcelorMittal Orbit.

The sculpture will be constructed out of a continuously looping lattice of tubular steel – surely a self-conscious nod to the fabric of Paris’s Eiffel Tower, another structure built to mark a global event (the Exposition Universelle of 1889).

It’s the kind of project that has only become possible in recent years, thanks to advances in the field of engineering: it is noticeable that Kapoor has collaborated with Balmond, of the engineering firm Arup, on most, if not all, of his biggest sculptures. Our age may well be remembered as the era in which engineers began to be considered as artists in their own right.Continue Reading

Telegraph on ArcelorMittal Orbit

April 2, 2010 by Marion Maneker

In London's Orbit

April 1, 2010 by Marion Maneker

The Independent covers the announcement of London’s newest attraction:

The Anish Kapoor designed tower will sit in London’s Olympic park and, standing at 115 metres, will be nearly 20 metres taller than the Big Ben clock tower and more than double the height of Nelson’s Column. It is being hailed as London’s answer to the Eiffel tower and aims to make the Olympics site a permanent visitor attraction.

The Arcelormittal Orbit, named after steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal who is partially funding the project, consists of almost 1,000 tonnes of tubular steel in a continuously looping lattice which visitors will be able to climb. The lattice is made up of eight strands winding into each other and combined by rings like a jagged knot. It will have two indoor 984ft (300m) viewing platforms, and a visitor pavilion at the base will include an educational exhibition.

Lakshmi Mittal, Chairman and CEO of ArcelorMittal, will fund up to £16million of the £19.1 million project, with the outstanding £3.1 million provided by the London Development Agency.

Mind boggling’ artwork that will tower over London (Independent)

Anish Kapoor Makes Times Rich List

January 31, 2010 by Marion Maneker

The Times of London pegs Anish Kapoor’s fortune at £40m. That’s not quite Hirst’s £235m or Lucien Freud’s £120m, but still a healthy achievement:

According to the Companies House filing, the main activity of Kapoor’s company, White Dark, is “the creation and sale of fine art”. Its 2008 accounts show an operating profit of £17.2m, up from £8.4m the previous year. Continue Reading

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