Hayward Gallery, London
Butcher bags, human sacrifice and cavernous black holes … in a world of dry art this stunning exhibition forces us to confront religion and mortality

It’s the clinging, transparent PVC that does it, a horribly surgical-looking, synthetic skin covering each of Anish Kapoor’s three paintings – can we call them that? – entitled Plastic Sacrifice I, II, III. They resemble a serial killer’s trophy art. Through the wrapping you gawp at three-dimensional purple and crimson entrails that slop off the wall, forming valleys and protuberances that, it seems, would collapse all over the floor if the carnage wasn’t contained by these butcher bags.

Sensationalist and macabre? Rembrandt’s painting Slaughtered Ox is just as visceral as it contemplates the flayed, hollowed body of a huge ox hanging upside down, its yellow fat and blood-dark meat a mirror of our own doomed flesh, not to mention the crucifixion. In the age of smartphones and minuscule attention spans, Kapoor gives artistic depth a go, addressing God and mortality, those themes of the old masters, in a metaphysical rollercoaster ride of a show, a divine bloodbath.

As he opens a career-spanning show in London, the Turner prize-winning artist gives us a private view of his giant studio and talks censorship, controversy and why disobedience is central to making great art

In Anish Kapoor’s 3,100 sq metre studio complex in south London, photographers, assistants and gallery representatives gather in an upstairs meeting room. The artist has a staff of 23 in London – 11 studio assistants, nine people in the offices, three stone masons at a yard in Battersea – and some have been with him for decades. When he’s in town, everyone wants a piece (“It’s like The West Wing,” says one gallery rep).

Anish Kapoor and his hazmat-suited assistant with some of the 31 parts of Ha Makom