Creativity Quote by Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor warns against the seductive stories that crystallize around artists: genius, visionary, outlaw, prophet. The art world, the media, and the artist’s own ego collaborate to produce these myths because they make a messy, provisional practice look coherent and legible. They are useful for branding and for audiences who want quick handles on complex work. But once believed, they begin to harden into costume and script. The artist starts performing an identity instead of risking discovery. Curiosity turns into repetition; the living process of making collapses into the safety of a persona.

Kapoor’s sculpture often courts unknowability: mirrored surfaces that dissolve the body, pigments that open onto an apparent void, interiors that swallow light and sound. He has long emphasized not-knowing and the studio as a site of uncertainty, where materials and accidents lead. That ethos cannot coexist with self-mythology. A myth tells the artist who they are and what they do; uncertainty asks what the work wants and where it might go next. The former refines a signature; the latter seeks a threshold.

There is also a refusal of cultural and market narratives that too easily attach to Kapoor himself. As an Indian-born British artist, he has been repeatedly framed as a spiritual or exotic figure; as the author of iconic public works like Cloud Gate, he is cast as a maker of monuments; as a figure in controversies, he is painted as monopolist or transgressor. Each story offers a ready-made identity that can eclipse the work’s material and phenomenological stakes. To not believe them is to insist that meaning arises in the encounter between object, space, and viewer, not in the legend of the maker.

The discipline here is humility and doubt. Keep returning to the studio, to the resistant fact of matter, to the awkward beginnings where nothing is guaranteed. Let the work dismantle the narrative rather than the narrative decide the work.