The next invited artist to the Monumenta exhibition in Paris (May 11 to June 23) with the mission to invest the Grand Palais’ Nave, "the painter who sculpts' (as he defines himself) Anish Kapoor has great success and an ever growing worldwide notoriety with the pieces he is dispersing all around the planet. For Pébéo and in exclusivity, he examines through his artist's eye the relations he maintains between perception and dimension... Interview by Patricia Chaveau, communications director.

Anish Kapoor : You know it’s a very difficult space “the Grand Palais” because it’s big, it’s very big and also it has a quality of light that’s difficult let’s say. It’s almost bigger inside than the space outside and that’s the problem with it : how one engages scale in that space and the quality of space of course is very related to the light? So you know, I normally work by making model, so what I do is model of the space, quite small and then make kind of propositions to myself about what it could be. Now of course, at this stage, we are in production of... something (laughing).

Anish Kapoor : You know scale is one of the tools of sculpture, I make small work, I make studio scale work, I make human scale work, and I make big work too! I think, you know, we don’t have to be afraid of the size of the thing, the size of the scale of the thing is part of one of the tools that gives or that can bring meaning ; that’s the real important question.

Anish Kapoor : I’m deeply interested in colour, not just as a covering over a two dimensional surface but colour is tough, with three dimensional quality and of course in that condition it’s both material and non material, it’s that question about the materiality and the non materiality of colour, particularly the monochromatic colours that interests me.

Anish Kapoor : The three dimensional world is never fully three dimensional, the 3D world is also 2 dimensional, so it’s always illusory how one of the things about both objects and colour is that they are illusory : that they are never what they say they are, they’re always something else and it’s that something elseness that has motivated me over many years.

Anish Kapoor : I don’t have anything to say really, but we live in a world which is full of opposite things, you know we define ourselves by our masculinality or our feminity, by big or small, wet and dry, day and night, everything we are is opposite, and, in a way, it’s a view of life that I think has a huge materiality in it, so why not in Art? It’s what’s there, if you like, in the process of thinking about making things.

" A single form, a single colour. My ambition is to create a space within a space that responds to the height and luminosity of the Nave at the Grand Palais. Visitors will be invited to walk inside the work, to immerse themselves in colour, and it will, I hope, be a contemplative and poetic experience." Designed using the most advanced technologies, the work will not merely speak to us visually, but will lead the visitor on a journey of total sensorial and metal discovery.

Born in Bombay in 1954, he has lived in London since the 1970s. His work rapidly gained international recognition and has been awarded numerous prizes, including the famous Turner Prize, wich he won in 1991. His career has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions at the world's most prestigious museums including the Louvre, the Royal Academy, Tate Modern, etc... Recently, he has been commissionned to design the key landmark for the forthcoming Olympic Games in London : a 116 metre-high sculpture entitled " Orbit".