Anish Kapoor

Artist Anish Kapoor has rocked the Royal Academy. If ever there was an example of the walls of the establishment being ripped up and torn down this exhibition is surely it. Literally.

With pioneering new works as well as earlier sculptures the show, from the very outset, has the ‘wow factor.’

In Shooting into the Corner ( 2008-09) every 20 minutes, shells of gloopy, scarlet wax resembling congealed blood shoot from a canon across the Large Weston Room and smack against the wall of the Small Weston Room, the wax forming violent patterns on the hallowed walls and accumulating on the floor in a mound of sticky red.
It’s a true shooting gallery: a sombre-faced man in a black boiler suit loads up the canon with a shell of wax, starts the mechanics and: thwack, releases. The suddenness is shocking, startling and makes every onlooker jump. By the end of the exhibition 30 tonnes of wax will have accumulated in the corner.

Around this corner is another groundbreaking sculpture: Svayambh ( 2007) coming from the Sanskrit meaning ‘ self-generated.’ A vast block of red wax moves along tracks, squeezing its way through the gallery’s classical arches and leaving the pristine white walls stained with its angry trail.
How do they clean up afterwards? The wax is brutally scraped off, then the walls repainted . It took six coats of paint to cover the last wax residues.

But despite the red, the bloody connotations and the sheer scale of these two works this exhibition isn’t violent or oppressive. If anything, Kapoor’s maverick, unique manipulation of form and space  - that made him a Turner Prize winner in 1991 and one of the most influential artists of our time – gives the show an expansive, limitless feel.

When I Am Pregnant (1992 ) is a spherical swelling growing out of the wall. Look once and it’s a pregnant belly, look again and, it happily becomes part of the white lightness from whence it came.

Yellow ( 1999 ) is another sublime, huge-scale piece, subverting what is concave and convex. We want to be surrounded by the yellow, to climb into it, but know that's impossible, both because our eyes have been tricked, but also because, despite all our instincts, we’re not allowed to touch ( quite rightly, of course.)
In fact, I overhear Kapoor himself gently reminding one of the RA staff that he “ really has to watch very carefully,” for visitors sneaking a stroke.

Because these are organic shapes. They are human. In his most recent work Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked (2008-09)  Kapoor uses complex technology enabling a three-dimensional printer to excrete concrete. The result is a body of cement sculptures resembling, without putting too fine a point on it, piles of poo, innards, entrails. But , again, we don’t recoil. There’s nothing nasty or icky about this piece, it's simple: peacefully uncomplicated mounds making a lunar-looking landscape.

And this is the beauty of Anish Kapoor. He himself states that he has nothing to say, because it’s the not knowing what to say that leads to the work. Looking for an intellectual meaning at this show – and there can be many interpretations, not least the collision of old and the new, traditional and modern – isn’t really the point. It’s all about feeling, instinct, breathing, reaching beyond, above and within.

Go to this exhibition. It’s life, just as we should know it.

Loma-Ann Marks

Anish Kapoor opens 26th September - 11th December, Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1J OBD, www.royalacademy.org.uk