Anish Kapoor

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

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.

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

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.

Much of what I make is geometric, and has a kind of almost mathematical logic to the form.

It’s the role of the artist to pursue content.

I’m not an artist who has an agenda that’s set by the work.

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

I, in the end, make art for myself.

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.

Work grows out of other work, and there are very few eureka moments.

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.

I’ve nothing to say.

There’s something imminent in the work, but the circle is only completed by the viewer.

We live in a fractured world. I’ve always seen it as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness.

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.

That freedom that Picasso afforded himself, to be an artist in a huge number of ways, seems to be a huge psychological liberation.

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.

All ideas grow out of other ideas.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 feel there’s everything to do yet.

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.

The idea is that the object has a language unto itself.

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.

Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.

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.

The work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story.

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

I am Indian, and I’m proud of it. Indian life is mythologically rich and powerful.

Re-investing in one’s own little moments of insight is very important.

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for 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.

The eye is a very quick instrument, much quicker than the ear. The eye gets it immediately.

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 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.