Anish Kapoor Quotes

26 Sourced Quotes

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
Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Anish Kapoor
It is a conjunction of images I have always loved in his Sonnets to Orpheus and this work is, in a way, a kind of eye which is reflecting images endlessly

Anish Kapoor
Jerusalem is all about a very special relationship between the ground and the sky. This work attempts to bring the two together.
- India-born artist sculpts landmark symbol for museum.

Anish Kapoor
I am interested in sculpture that manipulates the viewer into a specific relation with both space and time. Time, on two levels; one narratively and cinematically as a matter of the passage through the work, and the other as a literal elongation of the moment. This has to do with form and colour and the propensity of colour to induce reverie. Consequently, I hope, an elongation of time. Space is as complex, the space contained in an objectmust be bigger than the object which contains it. My aim is to separate the object from its object-hood.

Anish Kapoor
Germans have a rather healthy respect for the arts and artists, [could] not be more different from the British perspective.

Anish Kapoor
I wake up early, does some meditation, take my children to school, and then go to the studio to begin my day's work. The food for his soul is typically India, but with lots of salad on the side.

Anish Kapoor
Architects have always hoped to find a way to skip that stage between design and finished building.

Anish Kapoor
This is a terror of a space, probably much more difficult than the Turbine Hall. It's three times the size, huge horizontally and vertically and above all the light is a killer. It's almost brighter than it is outside.

Anish Kapoor
It's a shame that I haven't done an exhibition in India till now. But I am working on one in Delhi for January 2005. If things go well, there will be another in Mumbai too.

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

Anish Kapoor
It is almost as if the 49-year-old global Indian was an alien in his place of birth.

Anish Kapoor
In Germany, it seems that the intellectual and aesthetic life are to be celebrated and are seen as part of a real and good education, whereas in Britain, traditionally – certainly since the Enlightenment – we've been afraid of anything intellectual, aesthetic, visual.

Anish Kapoor
It is 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
It is more than a month that he's been completely disappeared. It is a true tragedy. Accuse him of something. Give him a lawyer. Let him defend himself …

Anish Kapoor
The UK has two things, the arts and education, and both of them it pushes into the corner. It's the hugest, hugest mistake. Why do British ministers meet anyone from the arts other than to cut them? Compared to Germany, Britain has got quite a long way to go there, frankly.

Anish Kapoor
It's a building with a curious, difficult history that is inexorably linked to the history of Berlin, [he said] That's very potent. You can't make a show here without some reference to all of that. And it certainly makes a show here so much more interesting.

Anish Kapoor
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. Of course, it is the colour of the interior of our bodies. Red is the centre.

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

Anish Kapoor
One of the influences in his design for the tower was the Tower of Babel the sense of building the impossible that has something mythic about it. The spaces inside the structure, in between the twisting steel, are cathedral like, according to Balmond, while according to Kapoor, the intention is that visitors will engage with the piece as they wind up and up and in on oneself on the spiral walkway.

Anish Kapoor
In the UK, while the arts are the second biggest sector after banking, they probably form less than one tenth of 1% of government spending. It's completely scuzzy.

Anish Kapoor
Do you know there's a wonderful Christian idea in which Thomas stretches his hands out to try to touch Christ's wound and Christ says 'Noli me tangere' (do not touch me). What your eyes see your hands will always try to affirm. Much of dealing with the non-material is about this confusion between the hand and the eye, the ear and the eye, when the thing that you look at is uncertain, your body demands a kind of readjustment, it demands certainty. Something happens to where you are, to space; time changes. Time, I think, becomes slower. The mystical truth of art is time.

Anish Kapoor
It was there [India] I realised that engineering was not my cup of tea. I proceeded to London to look for avenues and got myself enrolled into Hornsey College of Art there. Initially, there was no hope for me, but one exhibition in 1979 made me. That proved to be extremely lucky for me.

Anish Kapoor
I've never met Ai Weiwei but he's a colleague, an artist. In a very simple way he is heroically recording human existence. All he's done is to record death by administration, death by corruption, inefficiency. I don't even think he's pointing that sharp a finger, frankly.

Anish Kapoor
I'm thinking about the mythical wonders of the world, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. It's as if the collective will comes up with something that has resonance on an individual level and so becomes mythic. I can claim to take that as a model for a way of thinking. Art can do it, and I'm going to have a damn good go. I want to occupy the territory, but the territory is an idea and a way of thinking as much as a context that generates objects.

Anish Kapoor
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. I've got nothing particular to say, I don't have any message to give anyone. But it is my role to bring to expression, let's say, to define means that allow phenomenological and other perceptions, which one might use, one might work with, and then move towards a poetic existence.

Anish Kapoor