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
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
I'm not necessarily interested in being the best Indian artist. I want to be the best artist I can be. That's enough of a declaration of intent.
Content arises out of certain considerations about form, material, context-and that when that subject matter is sufficiently far away.
If you get a bad review, you take that in your stride.
One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.
It's the role of the artist to pursue content
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
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
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.
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.
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 cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?
One must not believe any of those mythologies about oneself as an artist
If one is talking about sculpture then scale and skin is everything.
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.
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.
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
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.
I'm not an artist who has an agenda that's set by the work
My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis
I am Indian, and I'm proud of it. Indian life is mythologically rich and powerful.
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
