page_title: Anish Kapoor
section_title: Public commissions
hierarchical_section_title: Anish Kapoor / Career / Public commissions
caption_attribution_description: English: ArcelorMittal Orbit viewed from Stratford High Street (A118).
context_page_description: Sir Anish Kapoor CBE, RA is a British Indian sculptor specializing in installation art and conceptual art. Born in Mumbai, Kapoor has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s when he moved to study art, first at the Hornsey College of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art and Design.
  Kapoor represented Britain at the XLIV Venice Biennale in 1990, when he was awarded the Premio Duemila Prize. In 1991, he received the Turner Prize and in 2002 received the Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. His notable public sculptures include Cloud Gate in Chicago's Millennium Park; Sky Mirror, exhibited at the Rockefeller Center in New York City in 2006 and Kensington Gardens in London in 2010; Temenos, at Middlehaven, Middlesbrough; Leviathan, at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2011; and ArcelorMittal Orbit, commissioned as a permanent artwork for London's Olympic Park and completed in 2012. In 2017 Kapoor designed the statuette for the 2018 Brit Awards.
  Kapoor received a knighthood in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to visual arts. He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Oxford in 2014.
context_section_description: Kapoor's earliest public commissions include the Cast Iron Mountain at the Tachikawa Art Project in Japan, as well as an untitled 1995 piece installed at Toronto's Simcoe Place resembling mountain peaks. In 2001, Sky Mirror, a large mirror piece that reflects the sky and surroundings, was commissioned for a site outside the Nottingham Playhouse. Since 2006, Cloud Gate, also known as "The Bean," a 110-ton stainless steel sculpture with a mirror finish, has been permanently installed in Millennium Park in Chicago. Viewers are able to walk beneath the sculpture and look up into an "omphalos" or navel above them.
  In the autumn of 2006, a second 10-metre Sky Mirror, was installed at Rockefeller Center, New York City. This work was later exhibited in Kensington Gardens in 2010 as part of the show Turning the World Upside Down, along with three other major mirror works.
  In 2009, Kapoor created the permanent, site-specific work Earth Cinema for Pollino National Park, the largest national park in Italy, as part of the project ArtePollino – Another South. Kapoor's work, Cinema di Terra (Earth Cinema), is a 45m long, 3m wide and 7m deep cut into the landscape made from concrete and earth. People can enter from both sides and walk along it, viewing the earth void within. Cinema di Terra officially opened to public in September 2009.
  Kapoor was also commissioned by Tees Valley Regeneration (TVR) to produce five pieces of public art, collectively known as the Tees Valley Giants. The first of these sculptures, Tememos, was unveiled to the public in June 2010. Temenos stands 50 metres high and is 110 metres in length. A steel wire mesh pulled taut between two enormous steel hoops, it remains an ethereal and an uncertain form despite its colossal scale.
  In 2010, Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem was commissioned and installed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.  The sculpture is described as a "16-foot tall polished-steel hourglass" and it "reflects and reverses the Jerusalem sky and the museum's landscape, a likely reference to the city's duality of celestial and earthly, holy and profane".
  Also in June, Kapoor's Orbit was announced as the winning proposal for an artwork for the 2012 Olympic Games. The Greater London Authority selected Kapoor's sculpture from a shortlist of five artists as the permanent artwork for the Olympic Park. At 115 metres tall, Orbit is the tallest sculpture in the UK.
  A granite monument, a memorial garden, is to commemorate the British victims of 9/11 in New York's Hanover Square.
  When asked if engagement with people and places is the key to successful public art, Kapoor said:
  I’m thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It’s as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I’m going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects.
caption: ArcelorMittal Orbit, London Olympic Park, 2012
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