Mirror to the world

Anish Kapoor isn't done reflecting

- BLAKE GOPNIK

Tools and paint at Anish Kapoor's studio in Venice.

Anish Kapoor is one of the world’s most celebrated and popular artists.

Over the years, he has won Britain’s Turner Prize, a knighthood and an honorary doctorate from Oxford University.

In 2006, on the lakefront in Chicago, his stainless-steel Cloud Gate, aka The Bean, became early selfie-bait. The sculpture is like the legume of its nickname — if that were enlarged to the size of a tractor-trailer and polished to a mirror finish. Other Bean-ish sculptures have gone on to be built, for millions of dollars, in fancy spots around the world.

But right now, Kapoor, 71, is preparing to open a show that returns him to a much different era, in the late 1970s and early 80s in London, when he was still the classic starving artist. “Anish Kapoor: Early Works” opens Friday at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan.

The show presents the first sculptures Kapoor coated with powdered pigments, or set down among drifting piles of the stuff. They earned him a dose of art-world love.

When he used the same powders to line half spheres, critic Michael Brenson in The New York Times described the result as “the kind of magical, disconcerting sculpture that undoes vision and logic”. (The Jewish Museum will pair his early works with a few recent pieces that use Vantablack, a light-absorbing coating; Kapoor has the exclusive right to use it in works of art.)

Kapoor was born and raised in Mumbai, and since the 1970s has lived and worked in London, and lately, also in a grand palazzo in Venice, Italy.

In early September, on a video call from his studio in Venice, I spoke with Kapoor about his earliest art, and his very latest.