Anish Kapoor in his studio, 1983, 1983

Anish Kapoor joined Lisson Gallery in the early 1980s. His inaugural solo exhibition opened to the public between May - June 1982. At this time Kapoor was rising to fame, with his brightly coloured, pigment-coated sculptures, the biomorphic forms of the seminal 1000 Names series. Later works saw large-scale installations negotiating and negating space, seeming to swallow the ground whole, yet, at other times, collapsing in on themselves into a void, or creating a new space hovering between the work and its viewer.

Kapoor, writing about his artistic process in the studio once said: "I've always been interested in the magical. When I'm working on something in the studio I often find myself wondering how good it is, if it's doing enough. What I mean is not whether it's working formally - that's relatively straightforward - but whether it generates enough of that nonphysical, non-object-related character." - Anish Kapoor in conversation with Nicholas Baume, 'Mythologies in the Making', Anish Kapoor: Past Present Future, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2009