Recently I took myself on a little day trip to London to visit some exhibitions I was keen to see. I started at The Hayward Gallery down on the South Bank where they are showing a large exhibition by Anish Kapoor. As you enter, you are confronted by a huge red inflatable ball shape squeezed between floor & ceiling that fills the space literally with the physical form but also with a feeling of tension as the orb appears close to bursting against the contrasting brutalist concrete architecture. I quite enjoyed the immediate playful drama of it as it made me feel like Alice in Wonderland having taken the ’Drink Me’ potion.

The next room was full of Kapoor’s illusion works with various shapes painted in light-absorbing Vanda Black on to the walls, floor or sandstone. The effect of the Vanda Black makes the shapes appear to be bottomless holes or eerie portals to another realm. Kapoor imagines these dark voids as full of what doesn’t exist and representing the darker parts of ourselves. There is also a ‘portal’ that works in the opposite way using light and reflections to create the illusion of depth. These are fun to experience - playing with perceptions as you move around works that look deep and flat at the same time.

Rounding the stairs to the mezzanine things got a lot darker. Firstly, the space is dominated by an enormous inverted mountain painted in deep red and black which could read as lava or as blood and earth mixing together. The piece is called Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto and is inspired by the artists interest in the darker aspects of the human experience and in particular the ancient practice of ritual sacrifice. Mount Moriah used in the title of piece was in the place in the Bible where Abraham was asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, which he was about to do when God provided a ram to be killed instead. The piece which is hanging from the ceiling has an imposing physical presence which makes you feel slightly anxious to stand underneath it and I did like the way it carves up the space, looming down from above to about 5cm from the floor. I’m wishing now that I had laid on the floor and looked at it from that perspective.

My favourite works from this whole show were in this room titled Plastic Sacrifice i,II, II (pics below). These were 3 large sculptures hung on the wall that really bring to mind blood, entrails and bodily insides. This dramatic gore is contained in clear plastic that makes it feel partly like a butchers bag and partly like it is suffocating the contents as it is pulled tight over the forms. I was equally drawn to them with intrigue and repelled at the sense of horror they evoked. The light and reflections played off the taut plastic so they seemed to change shape when you move around them, then on closer inspection thickly applied oil paints over the silicone amorphous forms had a beautiful material quality as the colours swirled and merged. Standing in front of these I felt the sense of suffocation and needed to actively take deep breaths and i enjoyed the rawness of feeling like I could be looking at myself from the inside out. Also it made me wonder whether these would be defined as sculptures or paintings and I spent a happy little time pondering at what point thickly applied paint might become a sculpture.

In Room 4 is Ha Makom is another large scale piece that fills the room as a rock formation in bright red which leads to a dark doorway at the top. The phrase Ha Makom is derived from Hebrew meaning ‘The Place’ and is used to express the universal presence of the divine across space and time. I did not get a sense of spirituality or presence of the divine from this work but more like I was standing in an otherworldly landscape. This glorious and rich powdery textured red reminded me of some of his smaller works that I saw at his exhibition at the Royal Academy back in 2009, where his use of intense colour was the experience - it drew you in with wonder and left you wanting more. For me, those smaller ‘colour as a condition’ works were more intriguing than Ha Makom which felt like a very cool sci-fi film set where i was expecting aliens to emerge from the opening and a director shouting ‘…..aaaand, Action!” All very dramatic and exciting, but for me, not spiritual.

Outside on the balconies were a few of his reflective works which distort and play with your view and they do a wonderful job of creating new vistas with reflected clouds and bent skylines.

In the final room, Kapoor delivers his theme of ritual sacrifice much more directly with large trays holding models of entrails, innards and blood in works title Ritual Expiation (pics below). Some have his signature Vanta Black voids included which give the suggestion of another inner world beyond the fleshy insides of the bodily remains that the viewer is confronted with. For me, I felt like I had walked further into the props department of the alien film set. I think that with these works his message is delivered so literally that there is no subtlety and little space for mystery or discovery.

In my view, these did not hold the same sophistication as some of his other work. For example, the monumental installation titled Svayambh (2007) which I saw at that same exhibition at the RA previously mentioned. Svayambh is a huge block of red-blood coloured wax which slowly moves through 4 or 5 rooms seemingly being carved by the architectural arches, leaving traces and spills as it travelled back and forth. The colour and material alone created associations of flesh, blood, violence, the body and memory while still allowing the viewer to tap into their own experiences of being human on a much deeper level. The artist said of this work that he wanted it to appear as if it had created itself and that he had ‘let it occur’ and I found this more abstract approach had greater impact on me rather than the more obvious telling of the story that happens in Ritual Expiation I, II, III

All in all I really enjoyed the exhibition for all it’s drama and surprises and have come away with lots of thoughts and feelings to process which is always a good sign. The exhibition is on until 18th Oct 2026 at The Hayward Gallery and I would agree with the gallery when describes the exhibition as ‘featuring sculptures and paintings that provoke the senses' - It certainly does that.

Anish Kapoor - Hayward Gallery