A new book on artist Anish Kapoor, published by the (never-disappointing) Phaidon company, is out now. Simply titled Anish Kapoor, the hefty monograph covers over 30 years of the acclaimed sculptor’s work brought to life by hundreds of color photos.
But I was further delighted because this news reminded me of one of my all-time favorite public art pieces — ‘Sky Mirror,’ (shown in the photo above) that made its mark at Rockefeller Center in NY back in 2006. It was Kapoor who created the nearly 3-storey high concave mirror out of stainless steel. Of such work, he has explained, ‘A mirrored object may so camouflage itself in its surroundings as to appear like a hole in space.’ I’m not sure that it was the galactic ‘black-hole quality’ of the piece that attracted me to it, but it has certainly been memorable nonetheless.
Kapoor was born and raised in Mumbai, India, by parents from very different backgrounds, (his mother is Iraqi-Jewish and father Indian). In his teens he moved to Israel with his family but now works and lives in London. He has credited his childhood in India partly for his successes, in particular an early education that was ‘really cosmopolitan,’ and where he learned ‘as much about Jahangir and Akbar as .Louis XIV and Elizabeth I.’