Anish Kapoor’s artistic approach is, in its most recent phase, undergoing a radical shift toward the non-object. Complex formations, difficult to envisage or define, are giving way to dense, large-scale installations that appear coarse, even absurd. In this process, Kapoor, pushing at the limits of the conceptual and the experimental, turns directly toward the materiality of the body, orienting his newest constructions around an excess bound up with abject elements such as blood, flesh, viscera, and wound. Strange as it may appear, this abject representation, shaped by a material coarseness and density that hovers between revulsion and fascination, can equally be described as a practice that extends across the broad cultural history and reality of social and political trauma. Made from silicone, resin, and wax combined with red pigment, in a consistency that neither melts nor sets at room temperature, this body of work evidently completes an increasingly feral and organic imaginary.

decayed residues: a site of linguistic memory

Ha Makom (2026), a large-scale environmental installation, offers a clear index of the shift under discussion. With the open gate-like void positioned at its summit binding its references directly to debates on faith, this work is not merely a dark, pigment-coated depiction of a peak but a strange plastic density that generates a sense of tension and danger. Likewise, the series Ritual Expiation (2025-26), a set of floor sculptures containing forms that resemble internal organs, similarly stages representations built around religious reference in repellent trays, to a degree capable of provoking fear, disgust, and even nausea.

Kapoor’s blood-red dark-landscapes, increasingly symbolic in character and formless in appearance, are wrought from a strikingly rendered visuality composed of dramatically decayed residues that reveal the more violent and grotesque products of the imagination. In binding blood, sandstone, and earth to one another in this way, the artist emerges with a capacity for spiritual obscenity that is anything but ironic. In this context, Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto (2022), a site-specific installation first exhibited in 2022 in the entrance hall of the Palazzo Manfrin in Venice, gives the impression of a volcano and a mass of lava seeming to pierce the ceiling and hang down toward the floor. Appearing as though it might collapse at any moment, this enormous mass is positioned so that its peak nearly touches the gallery floor. In inverting the curve of the mountain, Kapoor seeks to underscore the unnatural character of the mythological narrative, the act of sacrifice, attached to this place named in scripture. The overturning of the mountain is, for this reason, not merely a physical gesture but a reversal of the natural order, of gravity, and even of divine command itself.

Ultimately, it is fitting to regard this series of red sculptures, the product of a transcendent imagination, as works that in their present form, unified by red, black, and purple and textured to resemble clotted blood, move along the boundaries of abject representation and become entangled with the politics of the body. These installations, presented within a grotesque structure and carrying the quality of a psychoanalytic experiment, ought to be read as among the most intense images of blind faith, political violence, and bodily fragility. It is therefore unsurprising that the experience of making sense of this dark productive universe, undertaken most often within a cross-cultural, historical, and contemporary phenomenological context, comes to terms with this well-constructed, timeless formal excess, one that draws on a measured mysticism and emphasizes the startling coherence of a cosmic fabric.