Anish Kapoor has a reputation for creating spectacles in urban settings by producing works of extreme size and scale. Before creating 70-646 Cloud Gate, Kapoor had created art that distorted images of the viewer instead of portraying images of its own. In so doing, he acquired experience blurring the boundary between the limit and the limitless. Kapoor drew on past experience to design Cloud Gate, in particular the designing of Sky Mirror (2001), a 20-foot (6.1 m) 10-short-ton (9 t; 9-long-ton) concave stainless steel mirror 70-647 that also used a theme of distorted perception on a grand scale.

Kapoor's objects often aim to evoke immateriality and the spiritual, an outcome he achieves either by carving dark voids into stone pieces, or more recently, through the sheer shine and reflectivity of his objects.[45] This Indian artist's works have no fixed identity, but rather occupy an illusionary space that is consistent with eastern theologies shared by Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism, as well as Albert Einstein's views of a non-three-dimensional world. Kapoor explores the theme of ambiguity with his works that place the viewer in a state of "in-betweenness". The artist often questions and plays with such dualities as solidity–emptiness or reality–reflection, which in turn allude to such paired opposites as flesh–spirit, the here – the beyond, east–west, sky–earth, etc. that create the conflict between internal and external, superficial and subterranean, and conscious and unconscious. JN0-532 Kapoor also creates a tension between masculine and feminine within his art by having concave points of focus that invite the entry of visitors and multiplies their images when they are positioned correctly.