Time & Perspective Quote by Anish Kapoor

Kapoor’s line punctures the studio-myth we love to sell: the lone genius struck by lightning, birthing masterpieces in a single incandescent hour. “Work grows out of other work” is a quiet correction, almost botanical in its logic. Art isn’t an event; it’s an ecosystem. One piece composts into the next, carrying forward technique, obsession, error, and the residue of decisions that seemed minor at the time. The phrase also has a strategic humility to it. By downplaying “eureka moments,” Kapoor isn’t denying inspiration; he’s relocating it from the romantic realm of revelation to the practical realm of iteration.

The subtext is partly defensive, partly ethical. Defensive because contemporary art culture, especially at Kapoor’s level of visibility, is addicted to origin stories: the breakthrough, the big idea, the neatly packaged concept. Ethical because the myth of sudden genius flatters a market that wants easily branded artists and instantly legible signatures. Kapoor suggests something messier: that ambition is built through repetition, through returning to a form until it yields new behavior. This is especially pointed coming from an artist associated with monumental spectacle and seductive surfaces; he’s reminding you that scale can be the byproduct of accumulation, not a single audacious leap.

Context matters: postwar contemporary art often valorizes process (seriality, material investigation, studio labor) even as the public consumes the finished object as pure magic. Kapoor tilts the camera back to the workshop, insisting the real drama is continuity.