Bean here

Artist Anish Kapoor finally to show in India

Since 2006, tourists and residents at Chicago’s Millennium Park near the waterfront have been enthralled by a giant, shiny, kidneybean-shaped sculpture in the middle of a plaza. Chicagoans have nicknamed it The Bean, and it is Indian-origin UK artist Anish Kapoor’s best-known work. He calls it Cloud Gate, and what it does is allow people to walk beneath it, through its 12-foot arch, and to see themselves and everything around reflected in its mirror-polished surface. It is startling, sensual, deft, and as entertaining as anything at an amusement park.

Kapoor’s oeuvre encompasses much more than just stainless steel, of course. At a far grander scale he has designed the ArcelorMittal Orbit, a sculpture that will be 377 ft tall when it is built to adorn London’s 2012 Olympic Park. (L N Mittal paid most of its £19.1 million cost, hence the name.) It looks like a curly-wurly Eiffel Tower.

But Kapoor also does small works — room-size, that is — which have a visceral effect. Some of those will be here in India, concurrently in Delhi and Mumbai between November and February, for Kapoor’s first ever shows in the country he left nearly 40 years ago. In Delhi, Kapoor’s show will be the first to be held in the new Exhibition Hall of the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA).

Different works will be shown in Delhi and Mumbai, but together the shows aim to give an idea of Kapoor’s range and recent path. They will end soon after the annual India Art Summit in Delhi in late January. The works will include 2009’s Shooting into the Corner, in which a giant paintgun shoots slugs of thick paint into a corner, and 1981’s To Reflect an Intimate Part of The Red, an installation consisting of shapes covered in bright, spice-coloured powders scattered around a wood floor like rocks in a Japanese Zen garden.

The shows are supported by the British Council, the Ministry of Culture and London’s Lisson Gallery.

At the NGMA, Jaipur House, India Gate, November 28-February 27, 10 am-5 pm except Thursdays (8 pm), Mondays closed