LONDON.- The British Council, in association with the Lisson Gallery London and the Indian Ministry of Culture will present the first ever major exhibition in India of works by the internationally renowned artist Anish Kapoor at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi from 28 November 2010 – 27 February 2011 and the Mehboob Film Studios, Mumbai from 29 November 2010 – 16 January 2011. The exhibition is sponsored by Louis Vuitton.

Organised across two sites, each exhibition will focus on a different strand of the artist’s practice and together will form one of the largest and most ambitious exhibitions of the artist’s work ever to be shown. It will feature a selection of sculptures and installations spanning the breadth of his career, from early pigment-based works of the 1980’s, to his most recent wax installations. Both exhibitions will feature works which were included in the recent, record-breaking exhibition of Kapoor’s work at the Royal Academy, London, which attracted over 275,000 visitors in less than three months and became the most successful exhibition of a living artist ever held in London.

Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. He was born in 1954 in Bombay and moved to London in the early 1970s where he has lived and worked ever since. He studied art at Hornsey College of Art (1973-1977) and at Chelsea School of Art (1977-1978). He quickly gained international attention and acclaim for a series of solo exhibitions at museums and galleries across the world. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1990, where he was awarded the ‘Premio Duemila’. He won the Turner Prize in 1991 and he received the prestigious Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2002, which he realised with the much-acclaimed work, Marsyas. Among his major permanent commissions is Cloud Gate (2004) for the Millennium Park in Chicago, considered to be the most popular public artwork in the world. He was recently awarded the commission with Cecil Balmond for a permanent artwork for the London 2010 Olympic Park, the ArcelorMittal Orbit.

The National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), New Delhi is one of the leading museums for modern and contemporary art in India. Recently re-furbished, the NGMA now includes three main exhibition buildings and the Anish Kapoor show will be the first major exhibition to be held in the gallery’s newly constructed Exhibition Hall.

The Mehboob Studios were founded by legendary filmmaker Mehboob Khan in 1954 to cater for the growing demand for quality film facilities in Bollywood. Situated on 20,000 square yards of seaside land in Bandra, in the heart of greater Bombay, the studio soon became a favourite with some of the leading filmmakers of the time.