• London, July 04, 2004: 20-feet-high monolith for MEMORIAL GARDEN by NRI artist Anish Kapoor: Award-winning NRI (Non-Resident Indian) artist Anish Kapoor will create a 20-feet-high monolith called "Unity" to be installed at the Southern end of a three-million-pound garden to be set up in Manhattan in the memory of the 67 Britons who died in the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre.
NRI, Anish Kapoor is one of the world's most influential sculptors
  
Anish Kapoor, sculptor with painter Akbar Padamsee


One of the most influential sculptors of his generation, Kapoor's sculptures are abstract and sensual - their surfaces inviting touch.

Anish Kapoor was born in Mumbai (Bombay) to a Hindu father and Jewish mother. He settled in London in 1973 and has been living and working here since. He studied at Hornsey School of Art and later Chelsea School of Art. Kapoor's early work was concentrated around lightweight materials of bright and often shocking colours. His direction changed in the late 1980s after he moved into a ground-floor studio space and began handling heavy and weighty materials, usually stone.

His pieces after this are characterised by roughly-hewn, large abstract shapes, geometric and organic forms. Some pieces are smoothed out, others remain raw from the chisel and his work can be explained by his quote 'I don't want to make sculpture about form... I wish to make sculpture about belief, or about passion, about experience that is outside of material concern.' (Oxford University Press, 1998). His work is about the relationships between forms and the tensions between the positive and the negative, the dark and the light and the solid and the space. A Kapoor sculpture will heighten and wake the senses with their bright colours, large shapes and interesting interplay between rectangular blocks and circular globes, for example.

His work has been exhibited all over the world and his held in many major international collections. His awards include the Premio 2000 (1990) where he represented the British Pavilion at the XLIV Biennale in Venice and the Turner Prize in 1991.

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