5 things to know about Anish Kapoor

Three decades on from his first major UK survey, Anish Kapoor is back at the Hayward Gallery for a major exhibition of his awe-inspiring works.

Filling the entirety of our Hayward Gallery, this exhibition features sculptures and paintings from many of Kapoor’s most iconic series including flawless steel mirror sculptures, mysterious objects coated in depth-defying Vantablack and immersive works which press against the building’s very edges.

To give you an insight into the exhibition, and the artist behind the works that feature within it, we’ve put together this easily digestible breakdown of five things to know about Anish Kapoor.

Anish Kapoor has nothing to say

Kapoor insists that he has nothing to say about his art. But don’t be mistaken – he’s not confessing to a shortage of creative inspiration. Rather, he’s stating a belief that the role of the artist doesn’t lie in pronouncements about the meaning of their own work. For Kapoor, an artwork isn’t a closed loop with a single interpretation. Instead it’s a quasi-living object full of mystery that, if successful, points to profound truths about the nature of our existence. It is our responsibility as viewers to complete the artwork with our own interpretations and possible meanings. By claiming to have nothing to say, Kapoor gives space for an open-ended dialogue between the art and its audience.

Kapoor paints the town red

Kapoor admits to an obsession with the colour red. A particular shade that often appears in his paintings and silicone works is called Alizarin Crimson: ‘It’s a very dark, bloody Bordeaux wine red’. This deep red appears in the exhibition across a range of materials: as oil paint applied to canvas in a traditional manner and mixed with silicone to create unsettling evocations of bodily entrails. Kapoor makes the colour red an inescapable part of the experience of his artwork: ‘I want to make something that’s red in such a way that its redness occupies the whole space of your vision.’

Anish Kapoor, the painter?

Kapoor is one of the most celebrated sculptors working today; his monumental public artworks have been encountered by millions of people around the world. Less widely recognised, however, is that Kapoor has also always painted. In fact, he has often described himself as ‘a painter working in sculpture’. What might the artist be referring to with such a statement? Perhaps it relates to the intensely coloured pigments he has used since his earliest sculptures, the gestural application of silicone thickly layered like oil paint, or the illusionistic depth created by his steel mirrored works. Ultimately, terms such as “painter’ or ‘sculptor’ might be too limiting for Kapoor, whose extraordinary artistic ambition pushes beyond conventional boundaries.

Kapoor fathoms invisible depths

Many of Kapoor’s sculptures invite us to contemplate seemingly infinite depths. Cavities lined with intensely dark pigments appear as bottomless openings within the walls and floors of the gallery itself. These mysterious forms hover between the physical and the immaterial, the knowable and the unknowable. Kapoor acknowledges their psychological dimension when he reflects that, ‘perhaps the darkest black is the black we carry within ourselves’.

Kapoor wants us to feel all the feels

Kapoor’s work encompasses extraordinary breadth. The Hayward Gallery exhibition includes artworks made with a wide array of techniques and materials ranging from sandstone to silicone, and from oil paint to pure pigment. The range of emotions his work elicits from the viewer is equally broad, ranging from wonder and amazement at the overwhelming scale of his installations, to confusion and uncertainty in front of seemingly depthless voids. The exhibition also includes recent works that draw on a darker range of human emotions, including disgust, horror, and fear. Kapoor invites visitors to respond to his works with, ‘love, hate, desire, revulsion or whatever else there is. The viewer is involved, there is always a conversation’.