Anish Kapoor's Hayward Show Is a Vantablack Bloodbath
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- Anish Kapoor's new Hayward Gallery exhibition features three "Plastic Sacrifice" paintings wrapped in transparent PVC, with 3D purple and crimson entrails contained like "butcher bags" the reviewer compares to "a serial killer's trophy art."
- The show includes Vantablack works where solid objects such as balls and blades protrude from the canvases but become literally invisible from the front because the light-swallowing nanomaterial makes them match their background.
- A centerpiece, "Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto," is a massive upside-down mountain hanging from the ceiling, painted in thick red and black slathers that suggest geology, lava, and fresh blood; the work references God's command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, with no angel intervening to stay the hand.
- "Ha Makom" ("The Place") is a colossal right-side-up mountain landscape whose tentacular outcrops are covered in pulsing red pigment and whose central pinnacle contains a dark portal meant to represent God.
- The exhibition culminates in the "Ritual Expiation" paintings, where god-like forms tower over giant metal trays heaped with blood-soaked bodies and purple gore spilling through gutters — imagery the reviewer likens to Aztec human sacrifice.
- A red curvy PVC inflatable blocking the mezzanine access initially reads as "a literally massive joke" but is recontextualized once the viewer sees it beside the hanging mountain as "monstrous bags of blood."
- Kapoor's stated thesis is that religion begins in sacrifice and that blood and spirit are one — a position the reviewer calls bizarre but credits with producing work that "moves, frightens and stuns" in an era of "small, dry" contemporary art.
Why it matters: Kapoor is using the full resources of a major London institution to argue that religion's origins lie in blood sacrifice, and the reviewer's visceral, often nauseated reaction suggests the show lands that argument in a way rare for contemporary exhibitions. For London's art-going public, the Hayward has effectively programmed a high-stakes religious-art spectacle during a moment when most gallery shows chase restraint and concept — making this a notable counter-programming bet for the South Bank.
