Time & Perspective Quote by Anish Kapoor

Kapoor’s refusal lands like a door quietly but firmly shut: don’t come looking for a confession. In an art world trained to treat the artist’s biography as the master key, “not about my life history” is a tactical rebuke. It’s also a jab at the contemporary appetite for origin stories - the CV as content, trauma as proof of depth, neurosis as branding. Kapoor is drawing a boundary between the work as an experience in space and material, and the work as a case file.

The phrasing matters. “Story of my neurosis” is deliberately unglamorous, even faintly contemptuous. It punctures the romantic fantasy that suffering automatically produces meaning, and it side-eyes the psychoanalytic mode of criticism that turns every void into a childhood wound. Kapoor’s sculptures and installations traffic in the opposite register: the bodily awe of scale, the destabilization of perception, the invitation to stand before something that won’t resolve into narrative. If there’s psychology here, it’s not diary psychology; it’s phenomenology - how a viewer’s senses get manipulated, how certainty fails.

Context sharpens the intent. Kapoor’s work has long been read through identity (as an Indian-born artist in Britain) and through the rhetoric of spirituality, emptiness, the sublime. His statement isn’t a denial of those readings so much as a refusal to be reduced by them. He’s insisting the artwork isn’t a proxy for the artist’s interior life; it’s an autonomous event that happens to you.