London
Anish Kapoor’s work has always been inventive, ambitious, and thought-provoking, his exhibitions something to anticipate and well worth a journey. I still remember the buzz and excitement when his self-generating sculpture My Red Homeland (2003) was shown in Málaga, Spain, in 2006. His current exhibition (through October 18, 2026) brings him back to London and the Hayward Gallery where, in 1998, he had his first major U.K. survey. The Hayward is a big gallery, with five large exhibition spaces, plus outdoor terraces; naturally, Kapoor fills them all.
You have to admire the sheer scale of his ambition. All of Nothing (2026), multiple six-meter-high sections of space-filling inflatable PVC, takes over the ground floor. In Room 3, Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022), a huge, encrusted, black-and-red flange suspended from the ceiling, comes close to scraping the floor. Ha Makom (2026), in Room 4, resembles the terrain of a volcano, while on the terraces, Tsunami (2025) and other works in more traditional materials like stainless steel compete with the London skyline.
Ambition, absolutely. But to what end? D.H. Lawrence once said to trust the tale, not the teller, meaning that it is often inadvisable to assume that what an artist says about their work is actually what it’s about. Meanwhile, major critics like Donald Kuspit have been arguing, for some time, that much contemporary art has little or no aesthetic value, having capitulated to the capitalism of the art market. Perhaps these avenues of critique explain why the press release, the exhibition wall labels, and featured quotations from Kapoor all insist on telling us (they don’t argue a case, they simply state) that these works “question how we experience our environment,” “challeng[e] our sense of scale and self,” are “overwhelming in size and emotional intensity,” elaborate on the artist’s “fascination with the sublime,” and are “spiritual.” The question is whether any of these statements are true.
Let’s look at notions of scale, sublimity, and spirituality. The aforementioned sculptures are certainly very large, impressively constructed, and cleverly installed, but they don’t really question how we experience our environment. Questioning, for a start, requires an act of engagement: How do you engage with what are basically large, bulbous balloons? Nor do they challenge our sense of self and scale (something any London skyscraper will do), convey emotional intensity (they are almost emotionless—in fact, the closest emotion is that of unpleasantness), or evoke any element of the sublime. Sublime means “of the most exalted or noble kind; awe-inspiring.” These works, instead of inspiring sublimity, operate in much the same way as Victorian theater: “Gosh, that’s a real horse! Look, that’s an actual train being driven across the stage.” We are in a world of effects, which shades very quickly into melodrama.
Kapoor describes the masses of body parts, organs, and tissues in the “Ritual Expiations” sculptures as an “evocation of ritual sacrifice.” Perhaps they work that way for him. For myself, and anyone I talked to, the immediate associations were with Grand Guignol theater and H.R. Giger’s designs for Alien. All of Nothing and Mount Moriah in particular (in addition to the three “Plastic Sacrifice” works) conjure Giger’s Alien ship with its panels where live bodies are enmeshed, sacrifices for the alien’s gut. Kapoor, however, posits these works as religious, doubtless much in the same way that many abstract painters assert the spirituality of their canvases—an assertion that’s impossible to prove. Much as I would like to, I can see no spirituality whatsoever in these works. They are melodramatically theatrical. Like a visceral horror movie, they revel in blood, guts, and gore, the difference being that this is a horror movie director who wants to be Christopher Nolan, producing The Odyssey on an IMAX screen.
Although these blockbuster spectacles constitute the primary focus, the show also features other genres of Kapoor’s production, including several works, such as Descent into Limbo (1992), in which he plays with perception, creating spatial ambiguities or illusions. Distorting, funfair-style mirrors even make an appearance. Though undeniably entertaining, such works offer little in the way of aesthetic interest or serious content. The same could be said of what Kapoor calls “void” works, which are coated in Vantablack, the “light-absorbing nanotechnology so black it makes three-dimensional forms appear entirely flat when seen head-on.” One “painting,” so coated, is encased in glass, which neuters the act of looking since all one sees are reflections.
Regrettably, this exhibition is a disappointment. The film mogul Cecil B. DeMille often said that you can’t underestimate the stupidity of an audience, though perhaps “innocence” would be a better word. At the Tate, a truly terrible Frida Kahlo show (10 huge rooms, only 30 Kahlo works, but hundreds of imitations by her followers and a roomful of Kahlo-branded teddy bears, mugs, and other assorted merchandise) is also drawing huge crowds. There is a sense that Kapoor, rather like Antony Gormley, has come to believe his own rhetoric. But he is too good an artist to continue in this bombastic fashion. That he has ideas is not in doubt. That he has the technical abilities (underpinned by the requisite finances and scores of assistants) is equally not in doubt. The question now is whether he can recover an equipoise between idea and aesthetic interest, or whether the art market will enslave him within its commercial strictures.
