Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.Collection: Art
Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.Collection: Space
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.Collection: Space
A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.
The work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story.
We live in a fractured world. I've always seen it as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness.
I've always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.
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.
You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.
That freedom that Picasso afforded himself, to be an artist in a huge number of ways, seems to be a huge psychological liberation.
It's 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.
Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I'll be around making art when I'm 80.
Content arises out of certain considerations about form, material, context-and that when that subject matter is sufficiently far away.
I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don't. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I'll come back to.
Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.
My first show sold within the first 3 minutes, and I came back to the studio and spent the next two and a half years making almost nothing.
One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.
One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?
One does afford oneself the luxury to come into the studio and all day, every day, spend one's life making aesthetic propositions. What an immense luxury.
One does not set out with the idea that I've just had a great idea and now I'm going to go and carry it out. Almost all art that's made like that doesn't go anywhere.
One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.
What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime - terror.
What one does in the studio is to pose a series of problems to oneself. I've got to look for some deeper meaning, for some reason for this thing to be in the world. There's enough stuff in the world.
A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me alreadyCollection: Darkness
The whole point of being an artist is to have no agenda. To say, you know, I don't know what I am going to do tomorrow, I don't know what it's going to look like, and I'm going to have a go at it.Collection: Artist
All ideas grow out of other ideasCollection: Ideas
I am really interested in the idea that art can reach wider, can go further, can go beyond the art world, why not? People are intelligent, people are visually intelligent, and why shouldn't the work be able to engage some of that?Collection: Art
The most important things that one's working on are not necessarily the most important things that one thinks one's working on.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Artist
The eye is a very quick instrument, much quicker than the ear. The eye gets it immediatelyCollection: Eye
What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime - terrorCollection: Darkness