‘I have a naughty schoolboy attitude’: Anish Kapoor reveals his latest epic creations
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- Anish Kapoor opens a career-spanning solo show at the Hayward Gallery this week — only his second UK solo exhibition there, 27 years after the Southbank Centre first gave him a major UK show in 1998
- Hayward Gallery staff drilled out a 1.5-metre-wide section of gallery floor in preparation; outgoing director Ralph Rugoff presented the solid concrete cylinder to Kapoor as a 72nd-birthday gift in March, calling it "what happens when you do that" about an artist who makes voids
- Kapoor's new works include "Ha Makom," a 31-part red mountainous structure with a signature dark rectangular void carved near its peak, and "Ancestor," a "meteorite form" his team has been working on for five to six months with hazmat-suited assistants applying red-tinted sawdust and resin
- The show will feature "All of Nothing," a red inflatable so large it cannot be seen in full from any vantage point, plus this year's "Ritual Expiation" blood-and-guts floor sculptures, the iconic "Descent into Limbo" void, and the upside-down "Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto"
- Kapoor runs a 3,100 sq metre converted-dairy studio in south London with a staff of 23, splitting his practice between commercially successful concave mirror paintings and the gargantuan pieces he says he has "never sold, not even one"
- Born in Mumbai to a Hindu Indian-navy father and a mother from the Iraqi-Jewish diaspora, Kapoor emigrated to Israel at 16, where he says he and his brother were called "kushi"; he now calls the current Israeli government's politics "revolting" and criticises the UK's arrest of pro-Palestine protesters
- Despite the political moment, Kapoor titled his new work "Ha Makom" — Hebrew for "the place" and one of God's names in Kabbalistic language — acknowledging "it's weird to have a Hebrew title, especially now"
Why it matters: This is only the second major solo show the Hayward has staged in 27 years, and it lands as Kapoor — Turner Prize winner, Royal Academician, knight, and one of nine artists put on UK passports alongside Constable and Shakespeare — reopens the Vantablack debate and wades into the Israel debate with a Hebrew title, making the show a rare convergence of art-world spectacle, commercial controversy, and personal political statement.
