Creativity Quote by Anish Kapoor

Kapoor’s red isn’t a palette choice so much as a bodily conviction. “Felt” is doing the heavy lifting here: he frames color as sensation before symbolism, a kind of sensory memory that precedes language. That matters because Kapoor’s work so often tries to short-circuit the viewer’s habit of reading art as message. He wants you to register red the way you register heat or pressure: immediate, engulfing, hard to argue with.

Then he lets culture in, but only as a maybe. “Maybe red is a very Indian colour” nods to a dense visual economy - vermilion powders, wedding textiles, temple pigments, the omnipresent red of ritual and auspiciousness - without collapsing into a neat identity claim. Kapoor has lived and worked largely in the UK; his career is a case study in how artists get packaged as “global” while still being asked to perform their origin story. The hedging (“maybe,” “one of those things”) reads like a refusal to be pinned to a single explanation: not disowning Indianness, not allowing it to become the whole caption.

The most revealing phrase is “recognise at some other level.” It suggests a pre-conscious archive, a place where diaspora experience, childhood seeing, and national color symbolism blur into something intimate and un-verifiable. Kapoor’s intent feels less like declaring what red means and more like defending why he returns to it: because certain colors don’t just represent where you’re from; they haunt how you perceive.