Top 40 Anish Kapoor Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All ideas grow out of other ideas.”

— Anish Kapoor

2. “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

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

— Anish Kapoor

4. “I, in the end, make art for myself.”

— Anish Kapoor

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

— Anish Kapoor

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

— Anish Kapoor

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

— Anish Kapoor

8. “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

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

— Anish Kapoor

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

— Anish Kapoor

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

— Anish Kapoor

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

— Anish Kapoor

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

— Anish Kapoor

14. “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

15. “Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive? I think it’s my role as an artist to bring to expression, it’s not my role to be expressive.”

— Anish Kapoor

16. “The most important things that one’s working on are not necessarily the most important things that one thinks one’s working on.”

— Anish Kapoor

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

— Anish Kapoor

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

— Anish Kapoor

19. “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

20. “It is important that artists are not outside the equation, we don’t stand on the sidelines. Artists are part of the story of a response, we cannot stand aside and let others make the response.”

— Anish Kapoor

21. “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

22. “Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.”

— Anish Kapoor

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

— Anish Kapoor

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

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

— Anish Kapoor

29. “Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.”

— Anish Kapoor

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

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

— Anish Kapoor

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

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

— Anish Kapoor

40. “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

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

— Anish Kapoor

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

— Anish Kapoor