Anish Kapoor review – a gutsy, gore-splattered show

It is the clinging, transparent PVC that arrests you first: a surgical-looking synthetic skin covering three works titled Plastic Sacrifice I, II, III. Through the wrapping sit three-dimensional purple and crimson entrails that slop off the wall, contained only by butcher bags.

The effect is visceral, a modern echo of Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, and it pushes at the old masters’ concerns with God and mortality in a metaphysical, often confrontational show. Elsewhere the Hayward fills with optical games. One work reads as a flat black square from one angle and a receding tunnel from another, recalling Malevich while also exploiting Kapoor’s experiments with the light‑swallowing material Vantablack.

Objects painted in that colour can seem to vanish when viewed head-on, and the voids invite tactile disbelief: you will want to stick a finger in them, as if testing the wound in Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas.

anish kapoor, plastic sacrifice, vantablack, hayward, pvc, butcher bags, entrails, rembrandt, malevich, caravaggio