Anish Kapoor, Lisson Gallery Review ★★★★★

Anish Kapoor moves between two modes of expression; he is an artist of two extremes. His current exhibition at Pitzhanger Manor, which presents a series of highly reflective surfaces and monoliths that would look perfectly at home in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, is clean, restrained and dispassionate. But at the Royal Academy in 2009 he took the opposite tack, famously firing a messy mixture of red paint and wax at the gallery walls, producing a scene that would have shocked even the most careless of butchers.

So, what of Kapoor’s latest show, his 17th at Lisson Gallery? There are no ‘flesh guns’ here, but the artist’s interest in painterly gore is demonstrated by great gestural works on canvas. Kapoor explains that blood is connected to ritual, and that he is interested in the fact that an 'impure' substance is also the source of life. He is talking about the womb, of course, about menstruation and sex. To that end, expect a great deal of visual innuendo, of bleeding orifices and dark voids. There is also an image of a phallus, leaking black paint, positioned suggestively against a sarcophagus-like object carved from pink onyx containing a huge, abstract vulva of marble. Outside, in the gallery's courtyard, three more sculptures demonstrate Kapoor's interest in the process of carving, of not freeing an object from a stone as Michelangelo described, but of containing forms within forms – an oblong within an oblong, a marble egg (or vulva) within a marble box.

Death, sex and a sense of the ritualistic combine to place this exhibition firmly at the more gruesome end of Kapoor's artistic spectrum. But, in taking 'risks', he is also asking fundamental questions about the male artist and the female subject. 'I'm a man, of course,' he explained at the press opening. 'So one of the things that arises here for me is – inevitably – can a man deal with women's questions and is a man allowed to?' That, it has to be said, is up to the female viewer to decide. This particular critic feels that Kapoor's strength lies in sculpture and that painting 'women's issues' should remain firmly in the hands of female artists.