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Anish Kapoor Reflects

May 7, 2012 by Marion Maneker

Jackie Wullschlager has Anish Kapoor to Lunch with the FT and gets this deep background on his path to becoming an artist:

Kapoor’s maternal family came from Baghdad, emigrating to India where his grandfather was cantor of the Pune synagogue – I question him about his mother.

“My mother? Oh God, don’t ask! God knows!” he answers hastily, adding without enthusiasm, “It was a great childhood.” The oldest of three brothers, Kapoor left India at 17 for Israel: “My parents were very cosmopolitan, we grew up with Judaism as a cultural reality, a family reality, rather than a religious one – which is right, I believe in that.”

Initially, he lived on a kibbutz, then studied engineering before realising “it really wasn’t for me, it was too tight. I went back to the kibbutz and decided I had to be an artist. I got myself a little studio and made some really bad paintings. My parents weren’t over the moon. I was so young and so naive. I’d hardly looked at any art, hardly ever seen a painting. Then I came to art school [Hornsey College of Art] in London and felt utterly liberated. They were very difficult years emotionally, but in a way I’m grateful for them. It took me many years of psychoanalysis to get over it.”

Was the problem a standard coming-of-age neurosis? Kapoor looks vaguely amused at this understatement. “Er, no. It was much, much, much more than that. It was a sense of disorientation, not culturally, but with myself, which I needed to live with, understand, be less afraid of. Perhaps I was also coming to terms with an idea that I wanted to do something. No – wait, it’s difficult to find the right words – a sensation that I had something to do, but I didn’t know how to do it and didn’t know if I could allow myself to do it.

“The first years when I was making art, I felt as if I didn’t exist if I didn’t work. Now I don’t. The work got better when I didn’t feel that. Now I’ve allowed the work to be the work, I can be me, and somehow we can live together.”

 Lunch with the FT: Anish Kapoor (Financial Times)

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Filed Under: Artists Tagged With: Anish Kapoor

About Marion Maneker

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