Anish Kapoor Review – This gritty, blood-soaked spectacle is a divine bloodbath | Anish Kapoor

IIt’s the sheer, clingy PVC that does this, and it’s a hideous surgical-looking faux skin that covers each of Anish Kapoor’s three panels – can we call it that? – entitled Plastic Sacrifice I, II and III. It’s like a serial killer’s trophy art. Through the cover, you look at the three-dimensional purple and crimson entrails descending from the wall, forming valleys and ridges, which look like they would tumble all over the floor if the carnage wasn’t contained by these butcher bags.

Exciting and horrific? Rembrandt’s “The Slaughtered Bull” is a visceral painting insofar as it contemplates the flayed, hollow body of a huge bull hung upside down, its yellow fat and dark, bloody flesh a mirror of our own afflicted body, not to mention the crucifixion. In the age of smartphones and scant attention spans, Kapoor experiments with artistic depth, addressing God and mortality, themes of the Old Masters, in a rollercoaster metaphysical journey of the show, a divine bloodbath.

As for short attention spans, Hayward fills it with so many tricks and surprises that you’ll probably drop your phone while texting into a black hole. Whether it will happen is less certain. One gallery is filled with visual excitement that leaves you unsure which endless abyss or portal is the actual void and which is a flat canvas that seems to drop into unknown regions. I am quite confident that the first work is just a painting of a black square – flat like the one painted by Kazimir Malevich in 1915. Approach it from one side and you will see the surface of the paint shining in the lights of the gallery: the flatness is visible. But from another angle, the surface dissolves, receding into a tunnel towards a molten, hazy whiteness.

These games were influenced by Kapoor’s experiments with the light-absorbing nanomaterial Vantablack. Look at two of Vantablack’s works here from the side and the solid objects, balls and blades, protrude from the paintings, but because they are painted a magical color like their background, if you stand in front of them they are literally invisible.

You’ll want to put your finger into Kapoor’s spaces, like the wide-eyed man putting his finger into the wound in Christ’s side in Caravaggio’s The Doubts of St. Thomas. Like the story of doubting Thomas, this art is about the divine nature. This is nothing new for Kapoor, as he has a look that evokes cosmic mystery. A 1992 piece suggests the door of an ancient Egyptian tomb: an upright block of sandstone with a door-like opening painted dark blue, its true depth bewildering, leading you into another world.

But his interest in religion has become clearer than ever – and more provocative. A room of voids that deceives the eye is an appetizer for what turns into a spectacular sacrificial banquet. In the next space, you will be amazed by a stunning sight, a mountain hanging upside down from the ceiling. Huge enough to feel realistic. He calls it Mount Moriah at the gate of the ghetto, in reference to the place where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

It’s like being inside a cave, underground. The overhanging mass is painted with thick strips of red and black paint suggesting geology and the human body as the mountain drips fire or lava that turns into fresh wet blood flowing down or upward. The overhanging mountain of Kapoor Cave is a scene of God’s harshest moments. He asks you to kill your son for me, and Ibrahim is ready to do it. There’s no angel here to stop his hand. You wonder if I’m about to sacrifice you too. Will this mountain fall on your head and make you a martyr for modern art? It’s difficult to create a sense of danger in an exhibition when we’re so used to anger and extremism, but this made me shudder with horror – and with delight.

This stunning exhibition turns the knife, starting with a literally huge joke: a curvy red PVC inflatable that cuts off what would normally be access to an open space on the mezzanine. But when you pass it by another road, to find Mount Kapoor hanging above you, you discover an inflatable red bulge next to the rock suspended in three circular, organic shapes that suddenly don’t look funny: they are monstrous bags of blood.

On the other side of the mountain are his paintings of plastic sacrifice. How many sacrifices does Kapoor’s god need? At this point I felt pleasure, amazement, awe, fear, disgust, and some actual nausea. How much of this are you supposed to take?

Quite a bit. You move on to Ha Makum (“The Place”), another huge mountain landscape. At least that’s the right way up. Tentacles of faux stone, covered in pulsating balls of red pigment, emerge from a towering central pinnacle containing a dark portal—a door to the hidden, like Kapoor’s black voids, but here representing something specific. God, I think.

And then you get to the ritual he’s been working on: god-like figures presiding over a mass slaughter. They rise above giant metal trays piled high with corpses and bloody body parts, purple blood seeping through the gutters. We seem to be in the Aztec world of human sacrifice. However, there is beauty in the paintings surrounding these vengeful killing trays. Showers and golden rectangles emerge from layers of color, like the golden rain in Titian’s Danae. The paintings are collectively titled “Ritual Atonement” – through all this violence you can apparently find peace.

Art does not have to be rational or explainable. Kapoor’s thesis that religion begins with sacrifice, and that blood and soul are one and the same, may seem strange, even ridiculous, but he has produced a work that is moving, frightening, and astonishing. In an age when art often seems content with small, dry efforts, Kapoor Hayward is soaked in the blood and entrails of his own sheer imagination.