Anish Kapoor, Lisson Gallery ★★★★★

Below is our preview, giving background information about the exhibition. Click here to read our Anish Kapoor review.

Artist Anish Kapoor began his career as a painter, but really he is so much more - with his richly substantial works and now iconic designs for the London 2012 Olympic Orbit tower. Art aficionados will remember the thrilling Anish Kapoor Royal Academy show in 2009, which featured a cannon as its centrepiece that regularly fired molten red wax at a white wall that eventually dissolved in a tide of visceral material.

Anish Kapoor Lisson Gallery exhibition 2015

In his new show at Lisson Gallery, where he has been exhibiting for over thirty years, Kapoor returns to his painterly origins. Dominating the room as you walk in are a new group of vast, seething red and white resin and silicon paintings. Kapoor has previously spoken of the influence on his work of Rembrandt and Francis Bacon – evident here in the fleshy skin of these striking new pieces. You’ll also find resonances with mythologies from India, Egypt, and classical Greece and Rome – reflecting Kapoor’s own trans-cultural identity as an artist who was born in newly-independent Bombay in 1954, but received formal training at London’s Chelsea School of Art.

Anish Kapoor: Marsyas

One link you might recognise in Kapoor’s richly referential practice is the legend of Marsyas, who was flayed by the Greek god Apollo and whose name was used as the title for the enormous Anish Kapoor Tate Turbine Hall commission in 2002.

Anish Kapoor art

The textures and surfaces of the materials seem like abstract conglomerations of flesh and blood, only enhanced by the white cube space of the Lisson Gallery, London. Kapoor’s works unapologetically respond to the contemporary media landscape where violence and death have become disturbingly normalized.

However you interpret these complex wax creations, Kapoor’s show is worth seeing for its combination of technical mastery and a unique tapestry of cultural allusions.