Home » Anish Kapoor » My work is not about my life history. It’s not about the story of my neurosis.

My work is not about my life history. It’s not about the story of my neurosis.

Anish Kapoor
History Life Neurosis Work

More Quotes By Anish Kapoor

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.
Anish Kapoor
Artist World
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.
Anish Kapoor
Now Will
Work grows out of other work, and there are very few eureka moments.
Anish Kapoor
Moments Work
The work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story.
Anish Kapoor
Meaning Work
You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.
Anish Kapoor
Day Fear Feeling God
The idea is that the object has a language unto itself.
Anish Kapoor
Idea Language
We live in a fractured world. I’ve always seen it as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness.
Anish Kapoor
Artist World
What one does in the studio is to pose a series of problems to oneself. I’ve got to look for some deeper meaning, for some reason for this thing to be in the world. There’s enough stuff in the world.
Anish Kapoor
Meaning Problems Reason World
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.
Anish Kapoor
Day Life Luxury
I’ve nothing to say.
Anish Kapoor
Nothing
The eye is a very quick instrument, much quicker than the ear. The eye gets it immediately.
Anish Kapoor
Eye Quick
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.
Anish Kapoor
First Nothing Years
I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form.
Anish Kapoor
Job Space
Re-investing in one’s own little moments of insight is very important.
Anish Kapoor
Moments
Red, of course, is the colour of the interior of our bodies. In a way it’s inside out, red.
Anish Kapoor
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.
Anish Kapoor
Artists Now Work Years
One must not believe any of those mythologies about oneself as an artist.
Anish Kapoor
Artist
It’s the role of the artist to pursue content.
Anish Kapoor
Artist Content
There’s something imminent in the work, but the circle is only completed by the viewer.
Anish Kapoor
Work
All ideas grow out of other ideas.
Anish Kapoor
Ideas
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.
Anish Kapoor
Art Artist Being Hope
I feel there’s everything to do yet.
Anish Kapoor
If you get a bad review, you take that in your stride.
Anish Kapoor
I am Indian, and I’m proud of it. Indian life is mythologically rich and powerful.
Anish Kapoor
Life
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.
Anish Kapoor
Food Reality Truth
Content arises out of certain considerations about form, material, context-and that when that subject matter is sufficiently far away.
Anish Kapoor
Content
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.
Anish Kapoor
Artist Vocation
What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that’s akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime – terror.
Anish Kapoor
Darkness Sense Terror
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.
Anish Kapoor
Much of what I make is geometric, and has a kind of almost mathematical logic to the form.
Anish Kapoor
Logic
One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.
Anish Kapoor
Art Experience
That freedom that Picasso afforded himself, to be an artist in a huge number of ways, seems to be a huge psychological liberation.
Anish Kapoor
Artist Freedom
A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.
Anish Kapoor
Darkness Deep Will Work
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.
Anish Kapoor
Boredom Moments Possibilities
Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.
Anish Kapoor
Body Sculpture Space
Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.
Anish Kapoor
Artists
One cannot set out to make a work that’s spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?
Anish Kapoor
Space Spiritual Work
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.
Anish Kapoor
Art Idea Now
I’m not an artist who has an agenda that’s set by the work.
Anish Kapoor
Artist Work
I, in the end, make art for myself.
Anish Kapoor
Art End
One doesn’t make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer.
Anish Kapoor
Art People