Anish Kapoor is an artist adept at the grand statement. In 2002 he filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with a giant steel and PVC sculpture called Marsyas: 150m long, red, and shaped like an ear trumpet. We flocked to see it. Kapoor’s art became national news.

Now he is news again. Kapoor, 51, is set to replace fellow artist Chris Ofili on the Tate’s 12-member committee of trustees. Ofili found himself at the centre of a conflict-of-interest controversy when the Tate paid £700,000 for a work of his, The Upper Room, in March. The appointment of another working artist to the committee might seem to invite further trouble. Kapoor’s new post should come as no surprise; look closely and you’ll find that he is one of London’s best-connected artists.

The man often hailed as Britain’s greatest living sculptor was born in Bombay in 1954. Circumstances ensured that he cultivated early a sense of exclusion: the son of an Iraqi-Jewish mother, he was the only non-Hindu at his school.

Next came a harder test. In 1972 Kapoor arrived in England to study at the Hornsey College of Art. A breakdown followed, but amid crisis came a hardened dedication to sculpture. “I had this feeling that if I didn’t make something . . . I wouldn’t survive.” By the early 1980s, his reputation growing, he had been picked up by the Lisson Gallery, London.

Since then his rise has been inexorable. In 1991 he took the Turner Prize, and from the late 1990s an international trademark has developed: works so grand in scale, in spaces so public, that they are “almost architecture”. After Marsyas, in 2004 the 110-ton stainless steel Cloud Gate – nicknamed the silver bean – was installed at Millennium Park, Chicago. Worldwide recognition, though, has not been enough to impress every part of the British Establishment. In 2002 Kapoor was tipped to win the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial commission with his plan for a 15ft-high “dome” of water floating on the Serpentine. Yet he lost out, by the tightest of margins, to American Kathryn Gustafson. Controversy surrounded the decision, and once built Gustafson’s fountain was beset by troubles from waterlogging to clogged drainage pipes.

But Kapoor need not have worried about this setback. A darling of the glitterati — Vivienne Westwood, Sir Norman Foster, and Alain de Botton all attended his recent book launch — he is set to create a New York memorial to the British victims of 9/11, and the Prime Minister himself approved his appointment to the Tate committee. The man who says he’s always considered himself an outsider must now, surely, reconsider.