Mumbai-born sculptorAnish Kapoor—the man behind the beloved bean-shaped "Cloud Gate" sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park—wants everyone to know that his abstract art has no inherent meaning, and he has nothing to say about it.

Anish Kapoor/VG Bildkunst, Bonn, 2013

'Symphony for a Beloved Sun' (2013)

"What we call 'abstract art' plays a game with you. There is a dialogue between you and a thing," the 59-year-old artist said this week while scrambling to install around 45 works for one of his largest exhibitions ever, which opens in Berlin today. "There isn't a meaning, but you come to a meaning. If I had something to say it would get in the way all the time."

Mr. Kapoor's show, which runs through Nov. 24 at Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau museum, features works dating from 1988 to the present. They're made from a range of materials including wax, stone and pigment powder. He included many new pieces, he said, to balance the show's retrospective quality. "You can tell the difference between something that is pushing toward some kind of inner process and something that is trotted out," said Mr. Kapoor, who lives in London.

His often large, striking pieces are well known for their technical precision and their creator's ability to hint at subjects such as violence without ever explicitly confronting them. In "Shooting Into the Corner," a work that has toured London, Vienna and Mumbai and appears again in Berlin, he and his assistants shot large pellets of blood-red wax from a miniature cannon into a museum corner.

A multiwork installation at Berlin's Martin-Gropius-Bau

Mr. Kapoor concedes that the museum's location exerted a major influence on his selection process. He says he chose a fair number of pieces that address violence. "My God, we've got that museum of death right next door," he says, referring to the Topography of Terror Museum, which sits on the former Gestapo and Nazi SS headquarters. "You can hardly do something in this building and not be aware of the weight of those histories." The highlight of the exhibition is his new work, "Symphony for a Beloved Sun." A 30-foot-wide red circle is supported by stilts and surrounded by conveyor belts that drop blocks of red wax onto the floor with a resounding thud.

Born in 1954 to a Jewish mother and Hindu father, Mr. Kapoor emigrated to London in 1973 and won the Turner Prize in 1991 for an untitled set of tan blocks of sandstone that had attracted the interest of art critics. But it was his colorful sculptures that first made him popular with the general public.

Such a piece is "Wound," a fire-engine-red pigment work in the Berlin show. Two stones, their interiors carved out and coated with red powder, flank a sliver of red pigment. The red crawls up the wall and protrudes into the room, seemingly suspended in the air. Another piece on display, "Blood Mirror IV," is a massive, concave aluminum dish. The 2013 work has a playful feel that is at odds with its sinister title. From a distance, it appears to be flat. Yet as one walks closer, it becomes evident that the sides of the dish curve and seem to exert a pressure on the viewer's ears.

It's a feeling "not unlike when you're descending in an airplane and your ears want to pop," says Alex Branczik, a senior director in Sotheby's BID +2.77%contemporary-art department, which has sold four of Mr. Kapoor's top five works at auction. Christie's sold a red dish similar to "Blood Mirror IV" in 2008 for $2.14 million.

Mr. Kapoor's most expensive works remain the metal dishes and stone "void" carvings—luminescent sculptures made of alabaster and with holes, concavities or windows hand-chiseled into them that are also featured in the Berlin show. Sotheby's sold an untitled alabaster sculpture in 2008 for $3.9 million, his most expensive work ever auctioned.

Both types of works are highly recognizable and trade fairly regularly at auction, a strategy by collectors known as "flipping" that many artists find insulting. Mr. Kapoor remains serene about both his branding and auction sales, saying that wild speculation in contemporary art is an inevitable result of the continuing economic crisis.

"It's as hot as can be," he says of the current art market, which saw Christie's pull in the highest total in auction history Wednesday night in New York, where it sold $495 million in postwar and contemporary art. "If in art we can find meaning and value, it's got to be a good thing."

Write to Mary M. Lane at mary.lane@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 16, 2013, on page D8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Anish Kapoor Strikes While Hot.