Anish Kapoor’s two-venue show, titled “Today You Will Be in Paradise,” should scare the living daylights out of you. Kapoor’s work characteristically bridges the exquisite and the grotesque, with each extreme harboring elements of the other. The recent relief sculptures at the gallery’s 24th Street space, composed of silicone and paint, are excruciatingly vivid evocations of blood and guts and worms wriggling under the earth. There are frightening appearances of bits of the non-organic world: a rag and a shiny ponytail, for example. At the 21st Street gallery, a huge earth and resin sculpture on a marble pedestal embodies elemental matter, but the rounded shapes beneath the rough monsterlike form could be taken as a multitude of udders, with the cavernous body offering succor and protection from the elements. The hint of nurturing fused with the menacing mass is characteristic of Kapoor’s work, which is at once seductive and confounding. —Barbara A. MacAdam
Pictured: Anish Kapoor: She Wolf, 2016, resin and earth, 107 by 355 by 209 inches. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels. Photo David Regen.