Anish Kapoor valuation
Void, pigment, mirror and a black so black he bought exclusive rights to it.
Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay in 1954, came to Britain in the early 1970s and studied at Hornsey and Chelsea.
What a work by Anish Kapoor is worth
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Bio
Anish Kapoor was born in Bombay in 1954, came to Britain in the early 1970s and studied at Hornsey and Chelsea. The early work used raw pigment heaped over simple forms so that the object appeared to have no surface at all; later came the carved stone voids, the polished stainless steel mirrors that invert the world, the red wax works, and public commissions including Cloud Gate in Chicago and the Orbit tower in London. He won the Turner Prize in 1991. In 2016 he acquired exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack, the darkest manufactured pigment, which provoked a public argument that has followed him since.
Fabrication and surface define this market. The polished stainless works are optically perfect and cannot be repaired invisibly — a scratch or a distortion is effectively permanent — so condition dominates value. Pigment works shed and cannot be touched or cleaned. Many pieces are editioned, some in small numbers, and edition, fabricator and installation specification all form part of the work. Kapoor has also produced gouaches, drawings and print editions, which are the accessible end of the output and are physically far more robust.
The etching portfolios
Kapoor's prints are mostly etchings published in portfolios by the Paragon Press in London: 15 Etchings in the mid-1990s, then History, Shadow and 12 Etchings, all in 2007, Breathing Blue in 2017 and Flow Yellow in 2019. Editions are small, usually between thirty and forty, and each sheet is signed and numbered. Single sheets from broken portfolios circulate and are valued as individual prints, and a complete portfolio in its original case generally stands above them.
Small editioned objects in steel, resin or pigment are the other accessible category. They come with certificates and installation instructions from the studio, and the certificate and the packaging are part of the work. A polished surface should never be cleaned before a valuation, because the wrong product or a cloth with grit in it can leave marks that are permanent.
The Doon School, Israel and A Thousand Names
Kapoor's father, a hydrographer in the Indian Navy, was Punjabi Hindu, and his mother was of Iraqi Jewish origin; her father was cantor of the synagogue in Pune. He went to the Doon School in Dehradun, and in 1971 moved to Israel with one of his brothers, living at first on a kibbutz. He began studying electrical engineering, left after six months, and decided there to become an artist. At Hornsey and Chelsea from 1973 he found a role model in Paul Neagu. He gave the pigment sculptures of the early 1980s a single title, A Thousand Names, taking the number as a symbol of infinity.
His public works include Sky Mirror, first made for the Nottingham Playhouse in 2001 and later shown at the Rockefeller Center and in Kensington Gardens, Leviathan at the Grand Palais in 2011, and Temenos at Middlehaven Dock in Middlesbrough, made with the engineer Cecil Balmond. He designed sets for Idomeneo at Glyndebourne in 2003 and for in-i, with Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche, at the National Theatre. He won the Premio Duemila at the Venice Biennale in 1990, received the Padma Bhushan in 2012 and was knighted in 2013. In 2018 he bought Palazzo Priuli Manfrin in Venice for the Anish Kapoor Foundation.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
