Stuart Semple

Anish Kapoo (Semple changed his name in 2024.) He is still commonly referred to by his birth name. In 2018, he devised Happy City, a citywide programme of public installations in Denver, Colorado. During the COVID-19 pandemic he co-founded the Virtual Online Museum of Art (VOMA). In 2021 he opened GIANT, an artist-led gallery in Bournemouth.

Since 2018 Semple has also campaigned against "hostile design", meaning architectural features intended to deter rough sleeping and other public behaviour, through the website hostiledesign.org.

Early life Semple was born in Bournemouth, Dorset, and studied art and design at Bournemouth and Poole College before reading painting and printmaking at Bretton Hall College, then part of the University of Leeds. He has said that being taken to see Van Gogh's Sunflowers as a young child was formative to his decision to become an artist. In his late teens he experienced a severe, near-fatal allergic reaction; he has described the episode, and his long-standing multiple allergies, as an influence on his decision to pursue art professionally and later referenced it directly in his work.

Career

Early career (2002–2009) Semple's first major London solo exhibition, Stolen Language – the Art of Nancyboy, was held at the A&D Gallery in 2002. Following the 2004 Momart warehouse fire, which destroyed a large number of contemporary British artworks in storage, Semple was commissioned to create a memorial piece from the salvaged debris, titled Burn Baby Burn. In 2005, in protest at remarks made by the collector Charles Saatchi, Semple hung one of his own paintings inside the Saatchi Gallery without permission.

His 2006 exhibition Epiphany, at Martin Summers Fine Art in London, addressed the role of religion in contemporary life through paintings drawing on advertising and graphic media. By 2007 his solo exhibitions were attracting significant early collector interest; a 2007 London show reportedly sold $1 million of work within its first five minutes. In December 2016 Semple responded with a paint marketed as "the world's pinkest pink", sold on condition that buyers declare they were not Kapoor and had no association with him. Kapoor later obtained a pot by other means and posted an image of his finger dipped in it on social media.

Semple followed with a series of black paints marketed as alternatives to Vantablack: Black 2.0 (2017), a matt acrylic developed with feedback from artists who tested early batches; Black 3.0, funded through a Kickstarter campaign that raised over £400,000 and released in February 2019; and Black 4.0 (2023), which Semple said was more stable than earlier versions and, unlike its predecessors, did not separate or crystallise at the surface over time. In 2025 he released YOLO, a paint he described as approximating "olo", a colour percept reported that year by University of California researchers as produced only through direct laser stimulation of the retina; as "olo" is not a reproducible surface colour, this is Semple's own characterisation rather than a scientific equivalence.

In 2021 Semple also released Easy Klein, marketed as "Incredibly Kleinish Blue", referencing International Klein Blue, the pigment associated with and trademarked by the estate of Yves Klein. ARTnews and Artnet News reported that the estate subsequently brought a trademark infringement claim against Semple over the product, which remains ongoing.

In June 2024 Semple changed his name by deed poll to Anish Kapoor, describing it as a way to test what ownership of a name means; he speculated the new name might let him approach Vantablack's manufacturer directly, though said he had not yet attempted it.

Freetone

In 2022 Adobe Inc. introduced a subscription charge for access to Pantone colour libraries within its design software, causing existing Pantone-referenced colours in users' files to display as black. In response, Semple released Freetone, a free plug-in of 1,280 colours designed to approximate the Pantone palette; its terms barred employees and associates of Adobe or Pantone from downloading or using it. NPR cited Semple in 2024 as a central voice in the wider debate over Pantone's control of colour licensing, more than a year after Freetone's release, indicating the plug-in's continued relevance. The work was later restaged in Dublin, Manchester, Hong Kong and Moscow.

In 2018 the Denver Theatre District commissioned Semple to lead Happy City, a six-week programme of public art across downtown Denver running from 18 May to 30 June, funded at more than $500,000 in partnership with Mental Health Colorado and the curatorial organisation Black Cube; nine Colorado-based artists and the Los Angeles artist Vince McKelvie contributed alongside Semple.

VOMA During the COVID-19 pandemic, Semple co-founded the Virtual Online Museum of Art (VOMA), an entirely computer-generated online art museum, with the architect Emily Mann and curator Lee Cavaliere. VOMA launched on 4 September 2020 and presented a permanent collection of more than twenty works, viewable as three-dimensional reproductions with 360-degree interactive zoom; Smithsonian Magazine described it as the world's first entirely virtual art museum, a characterisation also used by several other outlets at launch.

He curated Mash-Ups: Post Pop Fragments and Détournements with Nicky Carvell at the Kowalsky Gallery (DACS), London, in 2008, and later produced London Loves the Way Things Fall Apart (2009) and This Is England (2011) for Galleria AUS18, Milan.

In 2010, Semple curated This Is England at The Aubin Gallery (which he directed in association with Aubin & Wills and Shoreditch House), featuring Sarah Maple, Nicky Carvell, David Hancock and Richard Galloway. The exhibition later toured to Milan.

That same year, Semple presented Bazooka at The Aubin Gallery as part of Neville Brody's Anti Design Festival, marking the first UK exhibition by the French collective Bazooka.

In 2011, he curated the large-scale exhibition Mindful in the Old Vic Tunnels, featuring works by Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Mona Hatoum, Mat Collishaw, Sebastian Horsley, Sarah Lucas, Barney Bubbles, Liliane Lijn, Tessa Farmer and Semple. The exhibition coincided with a gala dinner at the Imperial War Museum hosted by Stephen Fry and Melvyn Bragg to raise funds for the Mind Creative Therapies Fund.

Following this, Semple founded GIANT later in 2021 in the same building, a 15,000-square-foot artist-led gallery. The exhibition also drew criticism after local MP Tobias Ellwood objected to one of the exhibited works, prompting public discussion about freedom of artistic expression; Semple defended the work in the local press.

In 2022, Semple curated FOREVER: CHANGED at GIANT, a group exhibition featuring artists including Ron Arad, Sarah Hardacre, Gavin Turk, Fabio Lattanzi Antinori and Tim Noble and Sue Webster. Other notable exhibitions at GIANT include Why We Shout: The Art of Protest (2021), curated by Lee Cavaliere and featuring works by Banksy, Jeremy Deller, Kacey Wong and Martha Rosler; The Opposite of a Feminist (2022), a solo retrospective of Sarah Maple curated by Semple; and further exhibitions by Daniel Lismore, Michael Simpson and Martin Parr.

In June 2026 the magazine The Fence published an article that reported allegations from former employees at Semple's gallery. Semple's legal representatives disputed the allegations. The site invited members of the public worldwide to photograph and submit examples of hostile design, such as dividers on benches, spikes on ledges and sills, and barriers at bus shelters, to a public archive, and to share images on social media using the hashtag #hostiledesign; Semple also distributed stickers for members of the public to place on offending structures.

Mental health and charitable work In 2011, Semple was made an ambassador for the mental health charity Mind. He established the Creative Therapies Fund within the charity, launched with Stephen Fry and Melvyn Bragg alongside the Mindful exhibition (see Curatorial projects), which backs mental health projects in the United Kingdom. He has continued to organise fundraising art projects for the charity, including a 2015 adult colouring book.

Semple has also supported Amnesty International, creating artworks for its Freedom of Expression campaign, and has advocated for artists' rights in the United Kingdom through the Design and Artists Copyright Society.

Exhibitions

Curated exhibitions Title Year Venue City