{"id":642721,"date":"2026-06-17T02:21:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T02:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/642721\/"},"modified":"2026-06-17T02:21:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T02:21:24","slug":"anish-kapoor-hayward-gallery-review-sculptors-metaphysical-urges-feel-both-audacious-and-genuine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/642721\/","title":{"rendered":"Anish Kapoor, Hayward Gallery review: Sculptor\u2019s metaphysical urges feel both audacious and genuine"},"content":{"rendered":"

A massive red inflatable form almost entirely fills the first room in Anish Kapoor<\/a>\u2019s Hayward Gallery<\/a> exhibition. It\u2019s at once awe-inspiring and faintly comic, as though we\u2019re about to be rolled into the ground by some gigantic tomato. <\/p>\n

If Kapoor wants to \u201cchallenge the viewer\u2019s sense of self and space\u201d, as the wall texts rather pompously put it, he could hardly have chosen a more spectacular way of doing it. But then Kapoor doesn\u2019t do things by halves. He is that most currently unfashionable kind of artist, the male \u201chero\u201d sculptor, in a tradition that includes Henry Moore, his own close contemporary Antony Gormley and, gulp, Michelangelo. <\/p>\n

Kapoor gained national celebrity firing paint out of a cannon at his Royal Academy retrospective in 2009, and went on to fill immense spaces such as Tate Modern and Paris\u2019s Grand Palais with truly colossal works. If he doesn\u2019t quite fit with the age of identity art, despite frequent references to his Indian and Iraqi-Jewish background, he\u2019s too famous to need to care. <\/p>\n

This major exhibition of mostly very recent work comes exactly 30 years after Kapoor\u2019s only previous Hayward show. It\u2019s the last show to be curated here by the gallery\u2019s outgoing director Ralph Rugoff, and with advance publicity promising entire mountains suspended from the gallery ceilings, it feels like one of the art events of the year before the door has even been opened. <\/p>\n

If Kapoor\u2019s work has always had a loosely spiritual dimension, he seems to have got a \u201creligious\u201d (his own word) bee in his bonnet since his last public showings. Basic sculptural concepts such as absence and presence, interior and exterior, are now conceived in near messianic terms. Picture (2026), simply a black square painted onto the gallery wall, represents \u201cthe void\u201d, which Kapoor defines as \u201cthe black we carry within ourselves\u201d. Painted in Vantablack, which absorbs up to 99 per cent of available light (controversially, Kapoor bought exclusive artistic rights to it in 2016), the shape appears to recede into the wall. <\/p>\n

\"TheThe \u2018immense udder-like protrusion\u2019 of \u2018Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto\u2019 (Anish Kapoor, Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto, 2022. \u00a9 Anish Kapoor. All rights reserved, DACS, 2026. Photo: Attilio Maranzano.)<\/p>\n

The effect is even stronger in Untitled, another current work, an elliptical area of black paint \u2013 though standing to the side, a bowl-like depression is revealed in the plaster. The play with illusion gets even trickier with Descent into Limbo (1992), a fenced-off black circle on the floor. Is it simply paint, or would we fall through the floor or even into limbo \u2013 a hinterland between heaven and hell \u2013 if we jumped onto it? <\/p>\n

I had to restrain myself from trying to climb into Paradise (2026), a white bowl-like structure projecting from the wall, to find out if its Vantablack frontal surface was solid or hollow. <\/p>\n

The tip of the promised mountain can be seen as we approach the middle gallery, suspended upside down so it almost touches the floor, an immense udder-like protrusion \u2013 Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022) \u2013 looming fantastically overhead as we enter. <\/p>\n

If the structure is simply silicone spread over a wooden armature, the massively thick larding with crimson and black paint gives it a disconcerting bodily feel, which is amplified in the work\u2019s title. Moriah in the Old Testament was the place where God tested Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice his son Isaac. The ghetto reference relates to Kapoor\u2019s Venice studio, which stands on the edge of the city\u2019s old Jewish quarter. <\/p>\n

The \u201cancient practice of ritual sacrifice\u201d, as the wall text describes it, has become a \u201cfocus\u201d of Kapoor\u2019s recent work, apparently as a metaphor for the creative act. If it\u2019s not clear how this work\u2019s messily massive presence amplifies that idea, its sheer audacity feels refreshing at a time when so much art has an Instagram-focused \u201cplease like me\u201d timidity. <\/p>\n

\"WouldWould we fall through the floor if we jumped onto \u2018Descent into Limbo\u2019? (Photograph: Filipe Braga \u00a9Anish Kapoor. All rights reserved, DACS, 2026)<\/p>\n

The overtly religious dimension extends into the show\u2019s most mysterious work, Ha Makom (2026), in which a rectangular aperture stands like some mythic threshold atop a mound of enormous bone-like fragments covered in some indescribable matter, which turns out to be nothing more enigmatic than wood chippings and glue. But it\u2019s lent an uncanny aura by red paint that manages to appear simultaneously matt and luminous. <\/p>\n

The title, meaning \u201cthe place\u201d in Hebrew, and the inspiration, Uluru, an Aboriginal spiritual site in Central Australia, reflect a yearning on Kapoor\u2019s part for a \u201cuniversal presence of the divine\u201d that can be felt \u201cacross time and space\u201d. Given the current catastrophic global situation, it would be nice if this pan-spiritual impulse could also be extended to \u201cacross cultures\u201d. <\/p>\n

With the final work \u2013 to my mind the least successful \u2013 we\u2019re back with the theme of ritual sacrifice, with floor-filling steel trays heaped with more paint-spattered silicon that suggests, we are told, \u201cbloodied masses of body tissue\u201d, related to \u201cthe darker aspects of our collective consciousness\u201d. The sense of mingled horror and wonder would feel less forced if it weren\u2019t explained in such painfully literal terms. <\/p>\n

While we tend to associate religious art with valuable materials, Kapoor\u2019s methods are pure theatrical prop-making. The mountain and those suggestively bone-like forms are completely hollow. But then, as Kapoor argues in the show\u2019s catalogue, all art is artifice and illusion. And even the most exalted theatre, it might be added, is entertainment. I came out of this exhibition feeling very well entertained, and if the metaphysical urges behind it don\u2019t always entirely add up, they feel completely genuine and, given the current state of things, not the least bit surprising.<\/p>\n

\u2018Anish Kapoor\u2019 is at the Hayward Gallery from 16 June until 18 Oct<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A massive red inflatable form almost entirely fills the first room in Anish Kapoor\u2019s Hayward Gallery exhibition. It\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":642722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-642721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/642722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}