Anish Kapoor Quotes (37 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Anish Kapoor: 37 quotes1 like

Famous Anish Kapoor Quotes

“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

Anish kapoor in conversation with Homi K. Bhabha in 1998. Quoted in pdf, Anish Kapoor, 18 December 2013, Royal Academy Organization http://static.royalacademy.org.uk/files/anish-kapoor-education-guide-558.pdf,

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

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

“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

Anish Kapoor: An unknown Indian

“I think I’ve had three or four moments in my work over the last twenty-five years that have been real discoveries. The pigment pieces felt to me as if they were a discovery about an object and what an object can be; how an object can be and not be. Then, of course, the void pieces. The idea that if I empty out all the content and just make something that is an empty form, I don’t empty out the content at all. The content is there in a way that’s more surprising than if I tried to make a content. So, therefore, the idea that subject matter is somehow not the same as content. Then, in a different sort of way, moving from matte surfaces to shiny surfaces. In terms of the fact that the traditional sublime is the matte surface, deep and absorbing, and that the shiny might be a modern sublime, which is fully reflective, absolutely present, and returns the gaze. This feels like a new way to think about the non-objective object.”

Anish Kapoor

Anish kapoor in conversation with Heidi Reitmaier in July 2007 in "Anish Kapoor" by Royal Academy Organization.

“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

“Jerusalem is all about a very special relationship between the ground and the sky. This work attempts to bring the two together.”

Anish Kapoor

Anish on his sculpture "Turning the world upside Down" quoted in “Israeli sky in Anish’s steel

Anish Kapoor Quotes about art

“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

“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

“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

Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

“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

Anish Kapoor: An unknown Indian

“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

Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

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

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor Quotes about the trip

“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

On his Tall Tree And The Eye bubbled towards the heavens in the courtyard of The Royal Academy of Arts in London. Quoted in "Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time."

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

Anish Kapoor

Quoted in Sculptor Anish Kapoor’s works an eye-opener for us, 25 November 2011, 18 December 2013, Economic Times http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2010-11-25/news/27630725_1_anish-kapoor-sky-mirror-warehouse,

“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

Anish Kapoor dedicates Leviathan sculpture to Ai Weiwei

Anish Kapoor Quotes

“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

His views of Arcelormittal Orbit
Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

“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

Anish Kapoor in conversation with Heidi Reitmaier, July 2007 in "Anish Kapoor" by Royal Academy Organization.

“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

Anish kapoor in conversation with John Tusa, 2003 in "Anish Kapoor" by Royal Academy Organization.

“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

On the neo-renaissance pile in the centre of Berlin, which he created as a challenge and an inspiration.

“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

Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

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

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

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

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor: An unknown Indian

“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

[Grant, Jennifer, MOMumental: Adventures in the Messy Art of Raising a Family, http://books.google.com/books?id=8Iu1QtZR_X8C&pg=PT184, 1 May 2012, Worthy Publishing, 978-1-61795-099-5, 184–]

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

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

“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

On the Levithian which Anish dedicated in Ai Weiwe
Anish Kapoor dedicates Leviathan sculpture to Ai Weiwei

“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

Anish Kapoor dedicates "Leviathan}, his largest ever art work at the Grand Palais in Paris to dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.
Anish Kapoor dedicates Leviathan sculpture to Ai Weiwei

“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

Anish Kapoor: An unknown Indian

“He came up with this very simple idea which was recognising that the location which we identified, which is an axial view straight up the main promenade of the museum at its highest point, would be the place where a simple hour glass form would offer the opportunity to invert the Jerusalem sky and built landscape. And that’s what he created – and it’s a superb thing.”

Anish Kapoor

Israeli sky in Anish’s steel- India-born artist sculpts landmark symbol for museum

“So that actually adds another dimension but that’s not the reason (why he was commissioned). We really felt that the spiritual and immaterial aspects of his work would really make for a strong statement with respect to a work paying tribute to Teddy.”

Anish Kapoor

Teddy Kollek, long-time Mayor of Jerusalem
Israeli sky in Anish’s steel- India-born artist sculpts landmark symbol for museum

“We picked him because he is a great sculptor. The flip side is it makes it quite interesting to work with him because not only was he born in India – he has an Indian father and a Jewish mother of Iraqi heritage – but he lived in Israel for a few years as a young man before he moved to the UK.”

Anish Kapoor

Israeli sky in Anish’s steel- India-born artist sculpts landmark symbol for museum