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Anish Kapoor, exhibition review: Silicone slaughter at the gates of hell

Sinister and visceral: Anish Kapoor’s new exhibition is at Lisson Gallery
Sinister and visceral: Anish Kapoor’s new exhibition is at Lisson Gallery

It looks like there’s been a slaughter in the Lisson’s pristine white spaces. And not just a sheep-size massacre but the killing and cutting up of a creature of monstrous scale.

In the ground-floor galleries Anish Kapoor’s three new sculptures appear like giant lumps of alien flesh; sinister, visceral but curiously unwhiffy. Two of them are made all the more uncanny by the fact that they are hanging from the wall, defying gravity and blurring traditional fine art categories.

Indeed, Kapoor has referred to these works as paintings. He makes them using silicone — the same material used for breast implants — which he mixes in pots with blood red pigments. He then builds up the surface by smearing on the thick, viscous layers like an abstract expressionist in a frenzy. Finally he covers the pieces in net, as if to contain the horror.

There are other new works in this show, including a series of gouache paintings in the same bloody colour palette and two of Kapoor’s crisply machined steel mirrors. But it is these outsized, amorphous masses of silicone that demand attention. You walk around them, look into their dark, unknowable voids and wonder what kind of hellish world it is that could throw up objects like this.

Tomorrow until May 6, Lisson Gallery; lissongallery.com