Anish Kapoor’s review – this brash, flamboyant and God-killing show | Anish Kapoor

Meit’s the sticky, transparent PVC that does it, the surgical-looking, artificial skin that covers everything. Anish KapoorThree paintings – can we call it that? -called Plastic Sacrifice I, II, III. They match the skills of a serial killer’s trophy. Through the wrap, you watch three purple and red guts that slide down the wall, creating craters and explosions that, it seems, would fall to the ground if there weren’t these kill bags.

Sensationalist and macabre? Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox is particularly vivid considering the body of a large ox lying on the edge, its yellow fat and black meat mirroring our destroyed body, not to mention the crucifixion. In the age of mobile phones and little attention, Kapoor gives artistic depth, talking to God and death, the themes of the old masters, in a magical show, divine bloodshed.

As for short attention spans, he fills Hayward with many tricks and surprises you can drop your average phone into a black hole. Whether it will fall in is uncertain. One room has some pretty cool animations that make you wonder which is an empty abyss or portal and which is a flat painting that seems to be falling into unknown territory. I am confident that the first work is a picture of a black circle – flat like that Kazimir Malevich painted in 1915. Approach it from one side and you see the paint shimmering above the gallery lights: the smoothness is apparent. But from the other side, the surface melts, and returns in the tunnel to the pure whiteness.

The game is based on Kapoor and Vantablack’s attempt to ingest a nanomaterial. Look at the two works of Vantablack here from the side with solid objects, balls and leaves, they come out of the canvas, but because they are painted in a magic color as their base, if you stand in front of them they are not really visible.

You’ll want to put a finger in Kapoor’s remains, just as the blind man pokes his finger in the living room at the side of Christ in Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. And as the matter of doubting Thomas, this skill is about the nature of godliness. This is not unusual for Kapoor – he has an amazing astronomical figure. A piece from 1992 shows the entrance to an ancient Egyptian tomb: a straight sandstone with a hole like a door painted in dark blue, its mysterious depth, leading you to another world.

But his interest in religion is more visible than ever – and more compelling. A trick-or-treating room that transforms into a sacrificial feast. In the next area you are shocked by a mind-blowing display, a mountain hanging upside down from the ceiling. Big enough to feel real. He calls it Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto, meaning the place where God told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.

It’s like living in a cave, underground. The hanging mass is painted with a thick layer of red and black paint that suggests that the whole universe is a human body when the mountain drips fire or lava that turns into wet blood, fresh to be poured down, or up. Mount Kapoor above the cave is the site of God’s cruelest time. Kill me your son, he begs, and Abraham is ready to do so. There is no angel here to stay his hand. You wonder if you too are about to be sacrificed. Will this mountain fall on your head, making you a modern martyr? It’s hard to imagine horror in a museum when we’re so pissed off, but this one made me shudder with fear — and joy.

This gobsmacking show twists the knife, starting with a big joke: a red PVC burner that cuts through what are usually openings for access to the mezzanine floor. But when you go another way, to find the mountain of Kapoor hanging over you, you find a red incense burner next to a hanging three-dimensional stone that suddenly doesn’t seem so funny: it’s a terrible bag of blood.

On the other side of the hill is his painting Plastic Sacrifice. How many sacrifices does Kapoor’s god need? At this time I had felt happiness, surprise, fear, horror, disgust and nausea. How much of this should you take?

A little bit. You are going to Ha Makom (“The Place”), another mountain place. At least this is the right way to go. Brightly colored fake stones, covered with red globs of pigment, emerge from a central core that has a black entrance – a hidden entrance, like Kapoor’s black voids, but here it represents something definite. God, I think.

And beyond that you get to the ritual he’s been working on until now: a god-like appearance leading to mass murder. They sit on top of large metal trays where bloody bodies and parts are piled up, and purple shells come out of the drains. We seem to be in the sacrificial world of the Aztecs. Yet there is beauty in the art surrounding some of the slaughter trays. Rain and golden cones come out of multi-colored planes, like the golden rain in Titian’s Danaë. The images are titled Ritual Expiation – through all this violence you can apparently find peace.

Art does not have to be loud or clear. Kapoor’s idea that religion begins with sacrifice, that blood and spirit are one, may seem strange, even absurd, but it has produced a work that is moving, terrifying and mysterious. In an era where art often seems content with small, dry efforts, Kapoor drenches Hayward in the blood and guts of his limitless imagination.