Anish Kapoor Quotes

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

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

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

The whole point of being an artist is to have no agenda. To say, you know, I don't know what I am going to do tomorrow, I don't know what it's going to look like, and I'm going to have a go at it.

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

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

All ideas grow out of other ideas

I am really interested in the idea that art can reach wider, can go further, can go beyond the art world, why not? People are intelligent, people are visually intelligent, and why shouldn't the work be able to engage some of that?

The most important things that one's working on are not necessarily the most important things that one thinks one's working on.

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

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

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

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

I, in the end, make art for myself.

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.

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

If sculpture can really deal with the body, because we all inhabit ourselves, and if sculpture can really do that, which it is supposed to be able to do, and through it ask questions, philosophical questions, about being, I think these are all things we work on, all of us in our different ways, so perhaps somewhere in there, there are moments where dumb objects can speak.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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