Anish Kapoor Quotes

“A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already”

“All ideas grow out of other ideas”

“Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.”

“Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I'll be around making art when I'm 80.”

“Content arises out of certain considerations about form, material, context-and that when that subject matter is sufficiently far away.”

“I am Indian, and I'm proud of it. Indian life is mythologically rich and powerful.”

“I don't want to have anything to say, it just gets in the way. I think the journey of an artist is a journey of discovery and some engagements with paint, with the nature of material, with bodily things...One wants to open the story, not close it.”

“I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.”

“I feel there's everything to do yet.”

“I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don't. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I'll come back to.”

“I'm not an artist who has an agenda that's set by the work.”

“I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.”

“I've nothing to say.”

“I, in the end, make art for myself.”

“If you get a bad review, you take that in your stride.”

“It's precisely in those moments when I don't know what to do, boredom drives one to try a host of possibilities to either get somewhere or not get anywhere.”

“It's the role of the artist to pursue content.”

“Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.”

“My first show sold within the first 3 minutes, and I came back to the studio and spent the next two and a half years making almost nothing.”

“My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis.”

“One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.”

“One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?”

“One does afford oneself the luxury to come into the studio and all day, every day, spend one's life making aesthetic propositions. What an immense luxury.”

“One does not set out with the idea that I've just had a great idea and now I'm going to go and carry it out. Almost all art that's made like that doesn't go anywhere.”

“One doesn't make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer.”

“One must not believe any of those mythologies about oneself as an artist.”

“One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.”

“Re-investing in one's own little moments of insight is very important.”

“Red is a colour I've felt very strongly about. Maybe red is a very Indian colour, maybe it's one of those things that I grew up with and recognise at some other level.”

“Red, of course, is the colour of the interior of our bodies. In a way it's inside out, red.”