Kapoor’s magnificent solo show at the Royal Academy is a delight – rooms filled with huge, tactile objects, shimmering surfaces, giant constructions, and slippery, wet gunk; a visual and physical feast, playing with shape, form, space and colour – where to begin?

Colour is Power

In ‘Pigments works’ clusters of objects heavily dusted in primary coloured pigment are arranged in little communities on the floor and occasionally on the walls, sticking out at right angles. They’re the earliest works in the show, going back to the start of the eighties. Each group has a poetic name like As if to Celebrate I discovered a Mountain Blooming with Red Flowers and comprises objects with their own singular shape – ranging from spiked clubs that look like flora in a Sonic the Hedgehog computer game, to lotus flower buds and to the pointed crescents on the top of Islamic minarets. The strange shapes, pure colour and unreflective surfaces make for something soothing – both on the eye and on the mind. For me it’s the pigment that really works – quietly and stealthily generating a richness of colour. Intense and satisfying, the reds, blues and yellows really buzz. Strangely, it makes me think of a portrait by Lucian Freud, Girl with Roses, which is part of the British Council’s Collection. To enhance the green stripes of the sitter’s jumper, Freud painted small, black dots on the green, making it leap off the canvas. In a similar juxtaposition of colour and shade, the shadow of each grain of pigment intensifies the colour.

In the adjacent room is the magnificent Yellow (1999), for which a false wall has been erected to contain a huge, buttercup-yellow cavity framed in the same yellow. The undulating levels create an optical illusion – both on ‘outy’ and an ‘inny’ belly button depending on how you look it. The intensity of the yellow pigment is both meditative – indeed there was a visitor practising yoga in front of Yellow – and energising. Shiny emulsion paint just wouldn’t cut the mustard.

In his recent series of Non-objects – a chamber of mirrors akin to those at the kids’ corner of McDonalds but more sophisticated – Kapoor eschews colour for reflective surfaces. Adults and children alike – we were all happily absorbed in manipulating our reflections in the convex, concave and cylindrical mirrors; space somersaults and disappears into itself in these giant objects. Despite the fun and even vertigo the mirrors engender, I find that they offer me nothing new to reflect upon – more surface than substance.

Similarly reflective forms greet the viewer in the RA’s courtyard, but this time in the shape of spheres or bubbles, jumbled on top of each other to create a wonky, towering mass - a feat of physics and imagination.

Antiquity to modernity and beyond

The epic piece Slug (2009) is something from the deep sea or nightmares; a shiny, red vulva-like mouth blossoms out of a writhing worm of resin. Numbers are etched into the different blocks of resin, exposing the piecing together of this monster and diminishing its mythical status, and also, possibly, referencing Joseph Beuys’ use of resin. The leap between the artificially shiny mouth and the dull, marble-like tentacle surveys the materials of sculpture from antiquity to the present today. The work brings to mind the sculpture Laocoön and His Sons, in which the Greek subjects battle against serpents sent by Apollo. In contrast, Kapoor maintains an ambivalent relationship between the forces in Slug; are they in battle – one consuming the other, or are they in a more umbilical-like symbiosis – one growing out of the other? The sculpture is both masterly in craftsmanship and rich in meaning.

Kapoor’s works cry out to be touched and climbed into – however, the gallery attendants and cordons make it clear that this is definitely a look but don’t touch show. It would be fun to climb into Hive, a sculpture that is something like Carsten Höller’s Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern meets Jim Henson’s movie Labyrinth. I hear that a guest at an event held at the RA innocently wandered in to the exhibition and down the tunnel of Hive’s mouth. He was seen again, but not without a ticking off I’m told. The clever thing with the sculpture is that from one viewpoint it looks like a big cave and from another a flat object which couldn’t possibly house a chamber, although it certainly does. I marvel at the planning that must have gone into creating this visual and physical conundrum, and the sheer boldness – it was built in a shipyard and pretty much fills the gallery.

Kapoor plays around with transmutation in the cryptically named Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked (2008-09). The exhibition notes explain that the different piles of cement that feature in this exhibit have been fashioned by a cement excreting machine – which explains why lots of it looks like coils of poo. Others look deceptively like heaped-up, deep pile bathmats considering they’re concrete. On an individual level they are ugly objects, but together they become something like an intriguing culture that has outgrown a Petri dish.

Making a mess

Svayambha (2007) is a towering slab of sticky, red wax that moves at a snail’s pace along tracks running between five galleries, leaving sticky, bloody residue as its bulk shifts through the connecting marble archways again and again. The sheer amount of waxy matter is impressive, and it’s something that would be great to prod and poke, leaving handprints and smears on its smooth sides. However, it’s hands-off. It seems that Kapoor is again more interested in making an installation that overshadows rather than fully involves the viewer. The bulk of Svayambha somehow takes over – literally by blocking the way to two galleries, and by being an unpredictable mound of matter vulnerably seeping and bleeding.

Making even more of a gooey mess, Shooting into the Corner (2008-09) fires a waxy red cannonball into the wall of a neighbouring gallery, smashing traditional concepts of the gallery space as it does so. The tension mounts in the small crowd as the gallery attendant slowly loads the cannonball with the cold purpose of an executioner and pumps up the pressure. It releases in the blink of an eye and finishes in a satisfying mess on the wall, along with many other splats and stains from hundreds of other wax bullets that have been fired throughout the duration of the show. It’s violent and aggressive, and sees Kapoor doing something completely different with colour and form – mixing it up in a horrible, growing, bloody mess.

The show demonstrates that Kapoor is master manipulator of both material and the viewer’s physiological state. From installation to installation, I lurch from contemplation to shock, from wanting touch, prod and poke to being repelled. The works both envelope me in colour, shape and form, and create an at arms length tactile experience. Despite not being able to touch the works, the textures none the less mark themselves on my mind, in a near perfect metaphor for touch.

Helen Holtom

Anish Kapoor, Royal Academy, 26 September – 11 December 2009