His notable public sculptures include Cloud Gate (2006, also known as "The Bean") 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;[5] Temenos, at Middlehaven, Middlesbrough; Leviathan,[6] 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.

[14][15][16][17][18] Anish Mikhail Kapoor was born in Mumbai, India, to an Iraqi Jewish mother[15][19] and an Indian Punjabi Hindu father.

[31] In the late 1980s and 1990s, Kapoor was acclaimed for his explorations of matter and non-matter, specifically evoking the void in both free-standing sculptural works and ambitious installations.

He produced a number of large works, including Taratantara (1999),[33] a 35-metre-high piece which was installed in the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead, England, prior to the renovation beginning there which turned the structure into the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art; and Marsyas (2002), a large work consisting of three steel rings joined by a single span of PVC membrane that reached end to end of the 3,400-square-foot (320 m2) Turbine Hall of Tate Modern.

Kapoor's Eye in Stone (Norwegian: Øye i stein) is permanently placed at the shore of the fjord in Lødingen Municipality in northern Norway as part of Artscape Nordland.

In 2008, Kapoor created Memory in Berlin and New York for the Guggenheim Foundation, his first piece in Cor-Ten, which is formulated to produce a protective coating of rust.

[36] Weighing 24 tons and made up of 156 parts, it calls to mind Richard Serra's huge, rusty steel works, which also invite viewers into perceptually confounding interiors.

Kapoor installed four sculptures during the festival: Sky Mirror at Brighton Pavilion gardens; C-Curve[38] at The Chattri, Blood Relations (a collaboration with author Salman Rushdie); and 1000 Names, both at the Fabrica Gallery.

He also created a large site-specific work titled The Dismemberment of Jeanne d’Arc and a performance-based installation: Imagined Monochrome.

The entrance of the tunnel is goblet-shaped, featuring an interior and exterior surface that is circular, making minimal contact with the ground.

Over the course of the exhibition, the work was progressively covered by some 160 cubic metres of earth by a large mechanical device, forming a sharp mountain of dirt which the tunnel appears to be running through.

In 2016, his art exposition in MUAC (Mexico City) was a success, with literary contributions from Catherine Lampert, Cecilia Delgado, and Mexican writer Pablo Soler Frost.

The gun lobby group had, without the sculptor's consent, used a filmed image of Cloud Gate in an approximately one-minute-long promotional video called "The Violence of Lies".

Since 2006, The Bean, a 110-ton stainless steel sculpture with a mirror finish, officially titled Cloud Gate, has been permanently installed in Millennium Park in Chicago.

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".

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.

His notable architectural projects include: Of his vision for the Cumana station in Monte Sant'Angelo, Naples, Italy under construction (as of June 2008[update]), Kapoor has said: It's very vulva-like.

[64] Kapoor has designed stage sets including for; the opera Idomeneo at Glyndebourne in 2003; Pelléas et Mélisande, La Monnaie in Brussels, and a dance-theatre piece called in-i with Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche at the National Theatre in London.

Vantablack S-VIS, a sprayable paint which uses randomly aligned carbon nanotubes and only has high absorption in the visible light band, also called the "blackest black" colour, has been exclusively licensed to Anish Kapoor's studio for artistic use.

"[68] Artists like Christian Furr and Stuart Semple have criticised Kapoor for what they view to be the appropriation of a unique material to the exclusion of others.

[69][70] In retaliation, Semple developed a pigment called the "pinkest pink" and specifically made it available to everyone except Anish Kapoor and anyone affiliated with him.

[67] In December 2016, Kapoor obtained the pigment and posted an image on Instagram of his extended middle finger which had been dipped in Semple's pink.

[76] He achieved widespread recognition when he represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale,[77] and recounts the experience in Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World.

Solo exhibitions of his work have since been held in the Tate and Hayward Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland, Reina Sofia in Madrid, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Musée des arts contemporains (Grand-Hornu) in Belgium, the CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux, the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Brazil, and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, New York City and Berlin.

In 2010, Kapoor retrospective exhibitions were held at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi and Mumbai's Mehboob Studio, the first showcase of his work in the country of his birth.

In May he exhibited Leviathan at the Grand Palais, and two concurrent shows in Milan at the Rotonda della Besana and Fabbrica del Vapore.

[89][90] From 2 October 2021 – 13 February 2022 an exhibition of works created during the pandemic – ‘Painting’ – was shown at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford.

[92][93] In 2009, Kapoor purchased a 14,500 sq ft (1,350 m2) Georgian-style residence at Lincoln's Inn Fields for about £3.6 million and had it redesigned by David Chipperfield.